The duality between singular points and inflection points on wave fronts (Q987175)

A differentiable map \(f:M^n\to N^{n+1}\) is called a wave front or simply a front if it lifts to an isotropic immersion to the projectified cotangent bundle of the target manifold. The isotropy is defined by means of the differential of the lift, whose image is required to lie in the contact hyperplane field of the target's projectified cotangent bundle. Using an earlier criterion by the authors, in this paper they find a duality between singular points and inflection points on wave fronts in the projective space. As an application one gets, for \(n=2\) and \(N=P(\mathbb{R}^4)\), the Euler-Poincaré number of the region inside the source surface where the Hessian takes negative values, as the algebraic sum of some inflection points. This is a generalization of an earlier formula by Bleecker and Wilson for immersed surfaces in \(3\)-space.