Videos

Motivic Euler numbers and an arithmetic count of the lines on a cubic surface

Presenter
March 30, 2017
Keywords:
  • Galois theory
  • Galois orbits
  • periods
  • motivic integration
  • Euler characteristics
  • Cayley-Salmon theorem
  • A1-homotopy theory
  • Grothendieck-Witt group
  • degree formulae
  • Poincare-Hopf theorem
  • enumerative geometry
  • generalizations of classical theorems
  • algebraic geometry
MSC:
  • 11R34
  • 11R32
  • 11Rxx
  • 11-xx
  • 14-xx
  • 14Cxx
  • 14C30
  • 55M25
  • 55M20
  • 55Mxx
  • 55-xx
  • 57R20
  • 57R22
  • 57Rxx
  • 14Jxx
  • 14J25
Abstract
A celebrated 19th century result of Cayley and Salmon is that a smooth cubic surface over the complex numbers contains exactly 27 lines. Over the real numbers, the number of lines depends on the surface, but Segre showed that a certain signed count is always 3. We extend this count to an arbitrary field using A1-homotopy theory: we define an Euler number in the Grothendieck-Witt group for a relatively oriented algebraic vector bundle as a sum of local degrees, and then generalize the count of lines to a cubic surface over an arbitrary field. This is joint work with Jesse Leo Kass.
Supplementary Materials