The polar family of webs and foliations (Q744427)

The main object of study of the present paper are webs in the projective plane \(\mathbb{P}^2\). The interest in web geometry arises in many places (see the introduction of the book of Pereira and Pirio for a historical account). In particular, webs in \(\mathbb{P}^2\) are intimately related to the geometry of nonlinear polynomial ordinary differential equations. For instance, to any equation of the type \(Q(x, f(x), f'(x)) = 0\), where \(Q\) is a homogeneous polynomial of degree \(k\), one can associate a symmetric tensor of 1-forms \(Q(x, ydx, dy) \in \mathrm{Sym}^k\Omega^1_{\mathbb{C}^2}\) which can in turn be completed to a \(k\)-symmetric twisted 1-form in \(\mathbb{P}^2\), say \(\omega\in \mathrm{Sym}^k\Omega^1_{P^2}\otimes \mathcal{L}\) defining a \(k\)-web in \(\mathbb{P}^2\). This \(k\)-web encodes the geometry of the original differential equation. A particular example is the study of quasi-linear polynomial ordinary differential equations through the geometry of foliations. An important problem here is to bound the degree of an algebraic leaf in terms of invariants of the foliation. In this respect a very important invariant of a foliation is the polar curve through a given point \(p\), which is the set of points in the plane in which the foliation is tangent to a line passing through \(p\). One of the objectives of the article is to generalize results valid in the context of polar varieties of foliations to polar varieties of webs, a similar notion defined by the authors. The article also studies the polar families of webs and foliations, this are the families of polar curves that arise when one varies the point \(p\). In this respect they obtain the valuable Theorem 4.1 which states that a generic member of a polar family of foliations has constant topological embedded type in \(\mathbb{P}^2\). The article is brief and clearly written.