Related papers: What Grassmann Knew: Incidence Theorems on Cubics
The 16-year old Blaise Pascal found a way to determine if 6 points lie on a conic using a straightedge. Nearly 400 years later, we develop a method that uses a straightedge to check whether 10 points lie on a plane cubic curve.
We examine quadratic surfaces in 3-space that are tangent to nine given figures. These figures can be points, lines, planes or quadrics. The numbers of tangent quadrics were determined by Hermann Schubert in 1879. We study the associated…
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…
In 1640's, Blaise Pascal discovered a remarkable property of a hexagon inscribed in a conic - Pascal Theorem, which gave birth of the projective geometry. In this paper, a new geometric invariant of algebraic curves is discovered by a…
We consider configurations of lines in 3-space with incidences prescribed by a graph. This defines a subvariety in a product of Grassmannians. Leveraging a connection with rigidity theory in the plane, for any graph, we determine the…
We study a wide spectrum of incidence problems involving points and curves or points and surfaces in $\mathbb R^3$. The current (and in fact the only viable) approach to such problems, pioneered by Guth and Katz [2010,2015], requires a…
We study the reciprocal position of nine points in the plane, according to their collinearities. In particular, we consider the case in which the nine points are contained in an irreducible cubic curve and we give their classification. If…
One of the general problems in algebraic geometry is to determine algorithmically whether or not a given geometric object, defined by explicit polynomial equations (e.g. a curve or a surface), satisfies a given property (e.g. has…
In 1888, Heinrich Schroeter provided a ruler construction for points on cubic curves based on line involutions. Using Chasles' Theorem and the terminology of elliptic curves, we give a simple proof of Schroeter's construction. In addition,…
We study incidence problems involving points and curves in $R^3$. The current (and in fact only viable) approach to such problems, pioneered by Guth and Katz, requires a variety of tools from algebraic geometry, most notably (i) the…
While geometry with transcendental curves, like the Quadratrix of Hippias and the Spiral of Archimedes, played a significant role in our modern developments of geometry and algebra. The investigation has fallen off in the modern era despite…
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…
Fulton asked how many solutions to a problem of enumerative geometry can be real, when that problem is one of counting geometric figures of some kind having specified position with respect to some general fixed figures. For the problem of…
We consider the structure of the point-line incidence matrix of the projective space $\mathrm{PG}(3,q)$ connected with orbits of points and lines under the stabilizer group of the twisted cubic. Structures of submatrices with incidences…
We consider the problem of finding the probability that a random triangle is obtuse, which was first raised by Lewis Caroll. Our investigation leads us to a natural correspondence between plane polygons and the Grassmann manifold of…
We consider the structure of the plane-line incidence matrix of the projective space $\mathrm{PG}(3,q)$ with respect to the orbits of planes and lines under the stabilizer group of the twisted cubic. Structures of submatrices with…
We prove a variant of the Sylvester-Gallai theorem for cubics (algebraic curves of degree three): If a finite set of sufficiently many points in $\mathbb{R}^2$ is not contained in a cubic, then there is a cubic that contains exactly nine of…
We discuss the theorem on the existence of six points on a convex closed plane curve in which the curve has a contact of order six with the osculating conic. (This is the ``projective version'' of the well known four vertices theorem for a…
A set $L$ of straight lines and a set $P$ of points in the Euclidean plane define an arrangement $\mathcal{A}$ = ($L$, $P$) of construction lines and registration marks, if and only if: (1) any point in $P$ is a point of intersection of at…
We survey recent (and not so recent) results concerning arrangements of lines, points and other geometric objects and the applications these results have in theoretical computer science and combinatorics. The three main types of problems we…