On real and complex cubic curves (Q1747818)

The paper under review is a nice survey on smooth cubic curves defined over \(\mathbb{R}\) and/or over \(\mathbb{C}\). The authors focus mainly on 3 canonical presentations of a cubic curve with equation \(\Phi = 0\), namely:\smallskip \(\bullet\) Hesse normal (projective) form \(X^3+Y^3+Z^3=3kXYZ\), \(k\in\mathbb{C}\), \((X:Y:Z:)\in \mathbb{P}^2(\mathbb{C})\);\smallskip \(\bullet\) Weierstrass normal (affine) form \(y^2=x^3+ax+b\), \(a,b\in \mathbb{C}\), \((x,y)\in \mathbb{C}^2\);\smallskip \(\bullet\) Riemann surface/Flat torus \(\mathbb{C}/\Omega\), \(\Omega\) a lattice of rank 2. The paper illustrates how to reduce to normal forms (and their main properties) and how to move from one form to the other. In particular it shows that every smooth complex cubic curve is projectively equivalent to a Hesse curve with \(k^3\neq 1\) (those with \(k^3=1\) are singular) and that an irreducible cubic curve is projectively equivalent to a Weierstrass curve over a subfield \(\mathbb{F}\) of \(\mathbb{C}\) if and only if it possesses a non-singular flex point with coordinates in \(\mathbb{F}\). It is worth remarking that flex points (i.e., the roots of the determinant of the Hessian \(3\times 3\) matrix of partial derivatives of \(\Phi\)) play a central role also in the description of the automorphism group of cubic curves which has order \(18n\) \(1\leqslant n\leqslant 3\) and is determined by a normal subgroup \(N\simeq \mathbb{Z}/3\times\mathbb{Z}/3\) acting transitively on flex points and by its quotient \(\mathrm{Aut}/N\) (of order 2, 4 or 6) which fixes one of the flex points. Moreover a flex point can be chosen as base point (i.e., neutral element) for the chord-tangent method to define an abelian group law on the points of the curve (as usually done for elliptic curves in Weierstrass form with the ``point at infinity'').