Plane quartics: the universal matrix of bitangents. Francesco Dalla Piazza, Alessio Fiorentino, & Riccardo Salvati Manni arXiv, 217(1):111–138, March, 2017. URL for code: http://www1.mat.uniroma1.it/people/salvati/materiale/bitangents.sage
Plane quartics: the universal matrix of bitangents [pdf]Paper  doi  abstract   bibtex   
Aronhold’s classical result states that a plane quartic can be recovered by the configuration of any Aronhold systems of bitangents, i.e., special 7-tuples of bitangents such that the six points at which any sub-triple of bitangents touches the quartic do not lie on the same conic in the projective plane. Lehavi (cf. [L05]) proved that a smooth plane quartic can be explicitly reconstructed from its 28 bitangents; this result improved Aronhold’s method of recovering the curve. In a 2011 paper [PSV11] Plaumann, Sturmfels and Vinzant introduced an 8 × 8 symmetric matrix that parametrizes the bitangents of a nonsingular plane quartic. The starting point of their construction is Hesse’s result for which every smooth quartic curve has exactly 36 equivalence classes of linear symmetric determinantal representations. In this paper we tackle the inverse problem, i.e., the construction of the bitangent matrix starting from the 28 bitangents of the plane quartic, and we provide a Sage script intended for computing the bitangent matrix of a given curve.

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