Related papers: Lines on cubic surfaces and Witt invariants
This paper deals with surfaces with many lines. It is well-known that a cubic contains 27 of them and that the maximal number for a quartic is 64. In higher degree the question remains open. Here we study classical and new constructions of…
Jordan showed that the incidence variety of a smooth cubic surface containing 27 lines has solvable Galois group over the incidence variety of a smooth cubic surface containing 3 skew lines. As noted by Harris, it follows that for any…
We present a collection of research questions on cubic surfaces in 3-space. These questions inspired a collection of papers to be published in a special issue of the journal Le Matematiche. This article serves as the introduction to that…
We give an explicit formula for the $27$ lines of a smooth cubic surface near the Fermat surface. Our formula involves convergent power series with coefficients in the extension of rational numbers with the sixth root of unity. Our main…
It is hypothetized that the algebra of the configuration of twenty-seven lines lying on a general cubic surface underlines the dimensional hierarchy of heterotic string spacetimes.
We give an arithmetic count of the lines on a smooth cubic surface over an arbitrary field $k$, generalizing the counts that over $\mathbb{C}$ there are $27$ lines, and over $\mathbb{R}$ the number of hyperbolic lines minus the number of…
We prove that the enumerative geometry of lines on smooth cubic surfaces is governed by the arithmetic of the base field. In 1949, Segre proved that the number of lines on a smooth cubic surface over any field is 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 9, 15, or…
In this, the first of three papers about $C_2$-equivariant complex quadrics, we calculate the equivariant ordinary cohomology of smooth antisymmetric quadrics. One of these quadrics coincides with a $C_2$-equivariant Grassmannian, and we…
We give an explicit formula for the expectation of the number of real lines on a random invariant cubic surface, i.e. a surface $Z\subset \mathbb{R}P^3$ defined by a random gaussian polynomial whose probability distribution is invariant…
We study lines on smooth cubic surfaces over the field of $p$-adic numbers, from a theoretical and computational point of view. Segre showed that the possible counts of such lines are $0,1,2,3,5,7,9,15$ or $27$. We show that each of these…
This is a note constructing a certain weight 4 automorphic form on the moduli space of cubic surfaces, posted here because it is referred to in math.AG/0002066
In this, the last of three papers about $C_2$-equivariant complex quadrics, we complete the calculation of the equivariant ordinary cohomology of smooth symmetric quadrics in the cases where the fixed sets have more than two components.…
A famous configuration of 27 lines on a non-singular cubic surface in $\mathbb P^3$ contains remarkable subconfigurations, and in particular the ones formed by six pairwise disjoint lines. We study such six-line configurations in the case…
We present a new normal form for cubic surfaces that is well suited for p-adic geometry, as it reveals the intrinsic del Pezzo combinatorics of the 27 trees in the tropicalization. The new normal form is a polynomial with eight terms,…
In this paper we determine the group of rational automorphisms of binary cubic and quartic forms with integer coefficients and non-zero discriminant in terms of certain quadratic covariants of cubic and quartic forms. This allows one to…
We construct explicit examples of cubic surfaces over $\bbQ$ such that the 27 lines are acted upon by the index two subgroup of the maximal possible Galois group. This is the simple group of order $25 920$. Our examples are given in…
It is shown that there exist non-singular cubic surfaces in CP^3 containing 5 twistor lines. This is the maximum number of twistor fibres that a non-singular cubic can contain. Cubic surfaces in CP^3 with 5 twistor lines are classified up…
The present paper deals with lines contained in a smooth complex cubic threefold. It is well-known that the set of lines of the second type on a cubic threefold is a curve on its Fano surface. Here we give a description of the singularities…
We prove the sharp bound of at most 64 lines on complex projective quartic surfaces (resp. affine quartics) that are not ruled by lines. We study configurations of lines on certain non-K3 surfaces of degree four and give various examples of…
We provide explicit combinatorial formulas for Ottaviani's degree 15 invariant which detects cubics in 5 variables that are sums of 7 cubes. Our approach is based on the chromatic properties of certain graphs and relies on computer searches…