The osculatory behavior of surfaces in \({\mathbb{P}}^ 5\) (Q2266455)

This article focuses on a certain class of surfaces in \({\mathbb{P}}^ 5\), exploiting the interplay between local projective differential geometry and global algebraic geometry. These are the so-called hypo-osculating surfaces, which have the property that at every point there is a hyperplane which is doubly tangent. The first main result of the paper, obtained by applying E. Cartan's method of moving frames, is that locally any such surface arises as a vector solution of one of the classical partial differential equations of physics (the wave equation or a generalized heat equation). Such equations were studied from a similar vantage point by G. Darboux and C. Segre, among others. The remainder of the paper is concerned with the global classification problem. Standard techniques in singularity theory yield formulas for the inflection cycles, and in the case of ruled surfaces there is an explicit numerical formula. By combining the earlier differential geometric results with Kodaira's classification of surfaces, one is able to arrive at a fairly complete understanding of the inflectionary behavior of hypo- osculating surfaces. In particular, the embedding of \({\mathbb{P}}^ 1\times {\mathbb{P}}^ 1\) as the quartic scroll is conjecturally the unique such smooth surface which is totally uninflected.