Related papers: Tangent Quadrics in Real 3-Space

The intersection of a quadric and a cubic surface in 3-space is a canonical curve of genus 4. It has 120 complex tritangent planes. We present algorithms for computing real tritangents, and we study the associated discriminants. We focus on…

We study the variety of common tangents for up to four quadric surfaces in projective three-space, with particular regard to configurations of four quadrics admitting a continuum of common tangents. We formulate geometrical conditions in…

Traves and Wehlau recently gave a straightedge construction that checks whether 10 points lie on a plane cubic curve. They also highlighted several open problems in the synthetic geometry of cubics. Hermann Grassmann investigated incidence…

A cubic surface in $P^3$ is known to contain 27 lines, out of which one can form 36 Schlafli double - sixes i.e., collections $l_1,...,l_6, l'_1,..., l'_6\}$ of 12 lines such that each $l_i$ meets only $l'_j, j\neq i$ and does not meet…

In this paper we study circles tangent to conics. We show there are generically $184$ complex circles tangent to three conics in the plane and we characterize the real discriminant of the corresponding polynomial system. We give an explicit…

We investigate the lines tangent to four triangles in R^3. By a construction, there can be as many as 62 tangents. We show that there are at most 162 connected components of tangents, and at most 156 if the triangles are disjoint. In…

We solve the following geometric problem, which arises in several three-dimensional applications in computational geometry: For which arrangements of two lines and two spheres in R^3 are there infinitely many lines simultaneously…

We discuss the problem of whether a given problem in enumerative geometry can have all of its solutions be real. In particular, we describe an approach to problems of this type, and show how this can be used to show some enumerative…

A solution is provided to the Bruxelles Problem, a geometric decision problem originally posed in 1825, that asks for a synthetic construction to determine when ten points in 3-space lie on a quadric surface, a surface given by the…

The conic sections, as well as the solids obtained by revolving these curves, and many of their surprising properties, were already studied by Greek mathematicians since at least the fourth century B.C. Some of these properties come to the…

We develop an essentially algebraic method to study biharmonic curves into an implicit surface. Although our method is rather general, it is especially suitable to study curves into surfaces defined by a polynomial equation: in particular,…

The square peg problem asks whether every continuous curve in the plane that starts and ends at the same point without self-intersecting contains four distinct corners of some square. Toeplitz conjectured in 1911 that this is indeed the…

In 1888, Hilbert proved that every non-negative quartic form f=f(x,y,z) with real coefficients is a sum of three squares of quadratic forms. His proof was ahead of its time and used advanced methods from topology and algebraic geometry. Up…

We show how the study of the geometry of the nine flex tangents to a cubic produces pseudo-parameterizations, including the ones given by Icart, Kammerer, Lercier, Renault and Farashahi, and infinitely many new ones.

In order to count the number of smooth cubic hypersurfaces tangent to a prescribed number of lines and passing through a given number of points, we construct a compactification of their moduli space. We term the latter a…

Quadratic points of a surface in the projective 3-space are the points which can be exceptionally well approximated by a quadric. They are also singularities of a 3-web in the elliptic part and of a line field in the hyperbolic part of the…

We discuss the classical problem of counting planes tangent to general canonical sextic curves at three points. We determine the number of real tritangents when such a curve is real. We then revisit a curve constructed by Emch with the…

We study the congruence of bitangent lines of an irreducible surface in the 3-dimensional projective space in arbitrary characteristic, with special attention to quartic surfaces with rational double points and, in particular, Kummer…

The main focus of this paper is on models of quartic surfaces, especially so-called complex surfaces. These are special fourth-degree surfaces that Julius Pl\"ucker introduced in the 1860s for visualizing the local structure of a quadratic…

We revisit the fundamental problem of assigning intersection multiplicities to subsets of solutions of (square) systems of polynomials. Severi [Ann. Mat. Pura Appl. 26 (4), 1947] suggested an intuitive dynamic solution to this problem which…