No label defined (Q4359485)

A cyclide is a projective algebraic surface in three-space, of degree four, having double points along a smooth conic. Because of their appearance in geometric optics, they were studied already by C. Maxwell. Nowadays they are used in geometric modelling. The classical book on surfaces by Jessop contains an excellent introduction to the study of cyclides, although its language and its methods are somewhat oldfashioned, and therefore hard to understand. There are modern reports on cyclides, but always written with emphasis on applications, with minimal use of mathematics. The aim of this dissertation is to study cyclides (over the field of complex, sometimes the real numbers) by the methods of modern algebraic geometry. The author deals with the equivalence of different definitions of the cyclide: The one given above, the definition as projection of a Del Pezzo surface from 4-space, or as a surface invariant under an inversion. The author classifies cyclides and describes their moduli space (essentially a weighted projective space of dimension six). The final chapter of this dissertation is devoted to the description of the different real forms of a given real cyclide.