An ordinary double point of a complex plane curve is a singular point with two smooth local branches
having distinct tangent lines. For a real plane
curve, an ordinary double point with two real branches is a crunode,
while one whose branches are nonreal complex conjugates
is an acnode. The necessary vanishing conditions for an
ordinary double point of a plane curve given by are
|
(1)
|
where
denotes a partial derivative. The Hessian
of
must also be nonsingular at the point.
Let
(or
)
be a smooth immersion parametrizing a space
curve. A point
,
where
denotes the image of
, is an ordinary double point of the space
curve if its preimage under
consists of two values
and
, and the two tangent vectors
and
are noncollinear. The two local branches corresponding
to these preimages have distinct tangent
lines.
Ordinary double points of an algebraic surface given by
satisfy the necessary conditions
|
(2)
|
where
denotes a partial derivative. The Hessian
of
must also be nonsingular at the point. An algebraic
surface has at most finitely many ordinary double points. Let
be the maximum possible number of ordinary double points
on an algebraic surface of degree
in complex projective
space
.
The values for
,
2, ..., 6 and known bounds for larger
are 0, 1, 4, 16, 31, 65,
,
,
,
,
,
, ... (OEIS A046001;
Chmutov 1992, Endraß 1995, Labs 2004, 2005).
The value
was known to Kummer (1864, as cited by Chmutov 1992), while
was proved by Beauville (1980) and
by Jaffe and Ruberman (1997). For
, the classical upper bound is
|
(3)
|
(Labs 2005, eq. 1.3). Examples of algebraic surfaces with many ordinary double points are given in the following table.
| nodes | surface | |
| 3 | 4 | Cayley cubic |
| 4 | 16 | Kummer surface |
| 5 | 31 | dervish |
| 6 | 65 | Barth sextic |
| 7 | 99 | Labs septic |
| 8 | 168 | Endraß octic |
| 9 | 216 | Chmutov surface |
| 10 | 345 | Barth decic |
| 11 | 425 | Chmutov surface |
| 12 | 600 | Sarti dodecic |
In complex algebraic geometry, an ordinary double point is the analytic hypersurface germ
of a nondegenerate quadratic form. It is an isolated singularity of type , with Coxeter-Dynkin
diagram
,
and is also called a "node" or "simple double point." In dimension
it has local analytic equation
|
(4)
|
Its normalized volume is for
(Li 2018, Example 5.3).