In the 19th century, Kummer extensively studied quartic surfaces in the complex projective 3-space containing 16 nodes(=ordinary double points). One of his notable results states that a quartic surface cannot contain more than 16 nodes. This leads to a classic question: how many nodes may a surface of degree d contain? The answer to this question is known only for a very low degrees, namely, degrees 5 and 6. To find the optimal answer(31) for quintics, Beauville introduced the concept of "even sets of nodes," which turned out to be highly influential in the study of nodal surfaces. Based on the structure theorem of even sets by Casnati and Catanese, we will discuss some structure theorems of nodal quintics and sextics with maximal number of nodes. This talk is based on joint works with Fabrizio Catanese, Stephen Coughlan, Davide Frapporti, Michael Kiermaier, and Sascha Kurz.
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