Recall that an elliptic curve over a field
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i.e a proper smooth connected curve of genus 1 eq
Mackenzie Rios
Answered question
2022-05-23
Recall that an elliptic curve over a field i.e a proper smooth connected curve of genus 1 equipped with a distinguished -rational point, I'll be really grateful for any help in understanding the following part of our course Let be an elliptic curve, using Riemann-Roch we construct an isomorphism into that can be written informally as , where and are rational functions such that and . Why does 0 map to the infinity point ? According to Hartshorne it is because both and have poles in 0 but I can't see why.
Answer & Explanation
aqueritztv
Beginner2022-05-24Added 10 answers
Prelude Throughout, I will refer to the distinguished point of as instead of 0. It is important to understand that your rational map p is simply not defined at , which is what you likely mean by saying that the morphism can "informally" be written as follows:
I personally think of this scenario in two ways: 1. A continuous extension of this rational map to . This is a more geometric approach and my below explanation is not rigorous (due to the field being completely general here), but I think it is helpful. 2. For a rigorous approach, you have to use a different rational representation of around and prove that it: 3. has the desired property and 4. is compatible with the one that you use everywhere else on the curve. Geometric Intuition Let us think of as a continuous and friendly field, like . Let's imagine as being embedded into some projective space . For a point , we use the notation if the projectivization of this point lies on the curve. With this notation, you have for any . Let be such that is the distinguished point of . Note that:
Because and have the aforementioned order at . Now if you let approach zero in this expression on the right (which is constant!), the point approaches . This can be turned into a formal proof if your field is actually continuous, but I will not spend a lot of time on it because we don't have or need this assumption here. Rigorous Approach To prove this properly, we need to understand the morphism globally, and provide a different rational representation around . The morphism φ corresponds to a morphism of (function) fields . The distinguished point is a maximal ideal in and we can write 1. 2. While is some element that is not in , we have and as per the assumption: 1. 2. Now let's define an a-priori different rational map as the composition of with the multiplication by where is a function with . In other words: 1. 2. 3. Hence: 1. (first coordinate vanishes) 2. (second coordinate doesn't) 3. (third coordinate vanishes) With , this implies . Now we are left to verify that the rational functions and are the same, which would prove that is an extension of to which proves what we desire. This is fairly straightforward: We only need to check that they agree on an open subset. For this subset, simply choose one where all of the functions are nonzero and you will get that the projective coordinates of and differ by the nonzero scalar factor , and so they are identical.