Notes
[Grossman and Sebline 2015]; to get a glimpse of this exhibition, one can go to this YouTube video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3QqKBWHarA
or read the review about it by E. Arthur Robinson Jr. in the November 2015 issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society (http://www.ams.org/notices/201510/rnoti-p1192.pdf).
For a more detailed account of the relationship between the quartics of Plücker and Kummer, see [Hudson 1905], chapter VI.
Klein and Wenker had already built a version of this model in 1870, and in a letter to Sophus Lie from July 1870 Klein described how he had used it to find the singularities of the asymptotic curves on a Kummer quartic. His findings, including the drawing of these curves that he sent to Lie, were published soon thereafter by Kummer in the Monatsberichte of the Berlin Academy, and then later reprinted [Klein and Lie 1884]. For details, see [Rowe 2018].
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Years Ago features essays by historians and mathematicians that take us back in time. Whether addressing special topics or general trends, individual mathematicians or “schools” (as in schools of fish), the idea is always the same: to shed new light on the mathematics of the past. Submissions are welcome.
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Rowe, D.E. On Models and Visualizations of Some Special Quartic Surfaces. Math Intelligencer 40, 59–67 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00283-017-9773-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00283-017-9773-3