Related papers: Desmic quartic surfaces in arbitrary characteristi…
We report on our project to construct non-singular cubic surfaces over $\bbQ$ with a rational line. Our method is to start with degree 4 Del Pezzo surfaces in diagonal form. For these, we develop an explicit version of Galois descent.
The desmic pencil of quartic surfaces is part of a beautiful, but mostly forgotten chapter of the classical theory of algebraic surfaces: it is the only non-degenerate pencil of surfaces in P3 containing at least three completely reducible…
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 prove that smooth quartic threefolds are symplectically irrational, i.e., cannot be related to projective space by a series of symplectic blow-ups, blow-downs, and deformations. This implies that they are algebraically irrational,…
We describe smooth rational projective algebraic surfaces X, over an algebraically closed field of characteristic different from 2, having an even set of four disjoint (-2)-curves N_1,...,N_4, i.e. such that N_1+...+N_4 is divisible by 2 in…
Cubic surfaces in characteristic two are investigated from the point of view of prime characteristic commutative algebra. In particular, we prove that, the non-Frobenius split cubic surfaces form a linear subspace of codimension four in the…
We study locally flat, compact, oriented surfaces in $4$-manifolds whose exteriors have infinite cyclic fundamental group. We give algebraic topological criteria for two such surfaces, with the same genus $g$, to be related by an ambient…
For any power $q$ of the positive ground field characteristic, a smooth $q$-bic threefold -- the Fermat threefold of degree $q+1$ for example -- has a smooth surface $S$ of lines which behaves like the Fano surface of a smooth cubic…
A projective hypersurface is nodal if it does not have singularities worse than simple nodes. We calculate the rational cohomology of the spaces of equations of nodal cubic and quartic plane curves and also nodal cubic surfaces in the…
Using a quartic surface and its rational curves we can give an infinite number of integer hexahedra; these are 6 sided 3d solids, each face a trapezoid, with all sides and diagonals having intger lengths.
In this article formulas for the quantum product of a rational surface are given, and used to give an algebro-geometric proof of the associativity of the quantum product for strict Del Pezzo surfaces, those for which $-K$ is very ample. An…
We develop the notion of Peskine sixfolds with associated K3 surfaces and cubic fourfolds and work out numerical conditions for when these associations occur. In discriminant 24, the first family for which there is an associated cubic…
Let F be a polarized irreducible holomorphic symplectic fourfold, deformation equivalent to the Hilbert scheme parametrizing length-two zero-dimensional subschemes of a K3 surface. The homology group H^2(F,Z) is equipped with an integral…
We exhibit new examples of rational cubic fourfolds, parametrized by a countably infinite union of codimension-two subvarieties in the moduli space. Our examples are fibered in sextic del Pezzo surfaces over the projective plane; they are…
We will consider a two dimensional "symmetric" subfamily of the four dimensional family of Fricke cubic surfaces. The main result is that such symmetric cubic surfaces arise as character varieties for the exceptional group of type G_2.…
We study those Lagrangian surfaces in complex Euclidean space which are foliated by circles or by straight lines. The former, which we call cyclic, come in three types, each one being described by means of, respectively, a planar curve, a…
A cyclic cover of the complex projective line branched at four appropriate points has a natural structure of a square-tiled surface. We describe the combinatorics of such a square-tiled surface, the geometry of the corresponding…
In 1884 the German mathematician Karl Rohn published a substantial paper on \cite{ROH} on the properties of quartic surfaces with triple points, proving (among many other things) that the maximum number of lines contained in a quartic…
The study of quadric surfaces of revolution is a cornerstone of classical Euclidean geometry, but its extension to the three-dimensional sphere $\mathbb{S}^3$ has not been sufficiently explored. This article addresses this important gap by…
Cubic fourfolds of discriminant 24 contain special codimension-two algebraic cycles of degree 6 and self-intersection 20. Such cycles may be represented by singular scrolls or del Pezzo surfaces. A discriminant 24 cubic fourfold gives rise…