Elliptic Curves over Rational Points

Joachim Thompson
May 16, 2019

Contents
1 Preliminaries 1
1.1 Geometric preliminaries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

2 Group Structure 2

3 Exercises 2

1 Preliminaries
1.1 Geometric preliminaries
In general, en elliptic curve E over a field K is an algebraic curve usually defined by an analytical equation
of the form
y 2 = x3 + px + q
where char(K) 6= 2, 3.

Sometimes we’d like to work over any field so, in those cases, we’ll adopt the “General Weierstrass
Equation”

y 2 + a1 xy + a3 y = x3 + a2 x4 + a4 x + a6

Remark 1.1. If char(K) 6= 2, then we can kill a1 and a3 . Similarly, if char(K) 6= 3, we can also kill a2 .
But what is more interesting about elliptic curves are their applications in number theory. Thus working
over Q we can appreciate three distinct possibilities:

• E has no rational solutions.

• E has an infinite number of rational solutions.
• E has only a finite number of rational solutions.

This implies something even more interesting that will be show in section 2.

Now, let E be an elliptic curve over Q. If A is a rational point and ` is a line through B with a rational
slope, it is not necessarily true that ` intersects E in another rational point. This changes if it intersects E
in two points.
Proposition 1.2. If A and B are two rational points on E, then the line AB intersects E in a third rational
point C. This allows us to generate many new rational points from old ones (but not necessarily all of them!).

1
 This follows from Bezout’s Theorem.
Theorem 1.3 (Bezout’s Theorem). Let X and Y be two plane projective curves defined over a field K
that do not have a common component (this condition means that X and Y are defined by polynomials,
whose polynomial greatest common divisor is a constant). Then the total number of intersection points of X
and Y with coordinates in an algebraically closed field L which contains K, counted with their multiplicities,
is equal to the product of the degrees of X and Y .
In addition, it requires a further but simple proof.

Proof.
Let’s suppose that we have a general cubic equation of two variables and a line ` : y = mx + n. When
we replace all the “y’s” by mx + n, we end up with a general cubic equation of a single variable. After that,
it is direct that if we have one solution, we can divide the cubic equation by one of the solutions, getting a
cuadratic equation (which is possible since Q[x] has a division algorithm). Since we also know that there is
another rational solution, we immediately deduce that the remainder root is also rational.

2 Group Structure
One of the principal properties of the elliptic curves over the rationals is their group structure. In this section,
we’ll prove that the set of the points of an elliptic curve are a group. Generally, we’ll refer to this group as
E(Q).

3 Exercises
1. Proove Remark 1.1 (Hint. Use a change of variables).