“The mathematics are usually considered as being the very antipodes of Poesy. Yet Mathesis and Poesy are of the closest kindred, for they are both works of the imagination.”
Thomas Hill
The Frobenius endomorphism of schemes confuses the hell out of me. There’s the absolute Frobenius, the relative Frobenius, the arithmetic Frobenius, the geometric Frobenius… It’s a huge mess of concepts. So, I think it’ll probably benefit me to write an article elucidating these ideas. Our task is to generalize the Frobenius endomorphism \(\mathrm{Frob}_R:R\rightarrow R\) defined by \(x\mapsto x^p\) for a commutative ring \(R\) of characteristic \(p\) (recall \(\mathrm{Frob}_{\mathbb F_{p^n}}\) generates the Galois group \(\mathrm{Gal}(\mathbb F_{p^n}/\mathbb F_p)\)), to the more general case of an endomorphism of a scheme of characteristic \(p\). We begin by defining the absolute Frobenius, and show that it has some undesirable properties, which prompts us to make modifications.