Incircular nets and confocal conics

We consider congruences of straight lines in a plane with the combinatorics of the square grid, with all elementary quadrilaterals possessing an incircle. It is shown that all the vertices of such nets (we call them incircular or IC-nets) lie on confocal conics. Our main new results are on checkerboard IC-nets in the plane. These are congruences of straight lines in the plane with the combinatorics of the square grid, combinatorially colored as a checkerboard, such that all black coordinate quadrilaterals possess inscribed circles. We show how this larger class of IC-nets appears quite naturally in Laguerre geometry of oriented planes and spheres, and leads to new remarkable incidence theorems. Most of our results are valid in hyperbolic and spherical geometries as well. We present also generalizations in spaces of higher dimension, called checkerboard IS-nets. The construction of these nets is based on a new 9 inspheres incidence theorem.Comment: 33 pages, 24 Figure

On a discretization of confocal quadrics. I. An integrable systems approach

Confocal quadrics lie at the heart of the system of confocal coordinates (also called elliptic coordinates, after Jacobi). We suggest a discretization which respects two crucial properties of confocal coordinates: separability and all two-dimensional coordinate subnets being isothermic surfaces (that is, allowing a conformal parametrization along curvature lines, or, equivalently, supporting orthogonal Koenigs nets). Our construction is based on an integrable discretization of the Euler-Poisson-Darboux equation and leads to discrete nets with the separability property, with all two-dimensional subnets being Koenigs nets, and with an additional novel discrete analog of the orthogonality property. The coordinate functions of our discrete nets are given explicitly in terms of gamma functions.Comment: 37 pp., 9 figures. V2 is a completely reworked and extended version, with a lot of new materia

Monodromy invariants in symplectic topology

This text is a set of lecture notes for a series of four talks given at I.P.A.M., Los Angeles, on March 18-20, 2003. The first lecture provides a quick overview of symplectic topology and its main tools: symplectic manifolds, almost-complex structures, pseudo-holomorphic curves, Gromov-Witten invariants and Floer homology. The second and third lectures focus on symplectic Lefschetz pencils: existence (following Donaldson), monodromy, and applications to symplectic topology, in particular the connection to Gromov-Witten invariants of symplectic 4-manifolds (following Smith) and to Fukaya categories (following Seidel). In the last lecture, we offer an alternative description of symplectic 4-manifolds by viewing them as branched covers of the complex projective plane; the corresponding monodromy invariants and their potential applications are discussed.Comment: 42 pages, notes of lectures given at IPAM, Los Angele