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Tetrahedroid


A tetrahedroid is a special quartic surface in the family of Kummer surfaces, with four planes forming a tetrahedron and each containing exactly four of its 16 ordinary double points (Elsenhans and Jahnel 2012, pp. 90-91). The cross sections by the faces of this tetrahedron are pairs of conics over the complex numbers meeting at those four ordinary double points.

A symmetric example in homogeneous coordinates (x:y:z:w) is

 x^4+y^4+z^4+w^4-x^2y^2-x^2z^2-x^2w^2-y^2z^2-y^2w^2-z^2w^2=0.

Its 16 ordinary double points are

 (0:1:+/-1:+/-1), (1:0:+/-1:+/-1), (1:+/-1:0:+/-1), (1:+/-1:+/-1:0),

with the signs chosen independently in each group. Thus each coordinate plane contains four ordinary double points. Setting w=1 gives an affine equation of the form also used for the Kummer surface.

Tetrahedroid

The illustration uses affine coordinates in the coordinate chart x+y+z+w!=0 to show the real locus of this symmetric example, with all 16 ordinary double points marked in red. The quartic surface is clipped to a finite box.

The tetrahedroids form a two-dimensional subfamily of the three-dimensional family of Kummer quartics (Elsenhans and Jahnel 2012, p. 91).


See also

Kummer Surface, Ordinary Double Point, Quartic Surface

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References

Elsenhans, A.-S. and Jahnel, J. "Kummer Surfaces and the Computation of the Picard Group." LMS J. Comput. Math. 15, 84-100, 2012. https://doi.org/10.1112/S1461157012000022.Fischer, G. (Ed.). Mathematische Modelle aus den Sammlungen von Universitäten und Museen, Kommentarband. Braunschweig, Germany: Vieweg, pp. 17-19, 1986.Guy, R. K. Unsolved Problems in Number Theory, 2nd ed. New York: Springer-Verlag, p. 183, 1994.Hudson, R. W. H. T. Kummer's Quartic Surface. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1905.

Referenced on Wolfram|Alpha

Tetrahedroid

Cite this as:

Weisstein, Eric W. "Tetrahedroid." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Resource. https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Tetrahedroid.html

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