Deformation of polar methods (Q1203384)

We study deformations of hypersurfaces with one-dimensional singular loci by two different methods. The first method is by using the Lê numbers of a hypersurfaces singularity -- this falls under the general heading of a ``polar'' method. The second method is by studying the number of certain special types of singularities which occur in generic deformations of the original hypersurface. We compare and contrast these two methods, and provide a large number of examples.