QUADRATIC POINTS OF SURFACES IN PROJECTIVE 3-SPACE

Quadratic points of a surface in the projective 3-space are the points which can be exceptionally well approximated by a quadric. They are also singularities of a 3-web in the elliptic part and of a line field in the hyperbolic part of the surface. We show that generically the index of the 3-web at a quadratic point is. +/- 1/3, while the index of the line field is. +/- 1. Moreover, for an elliptic quadratic point whose cubic form is semi-homogeneous, we can use Loewner's conjecture to show that the index is at most 1. From the above local results, we can conclude some global results: A generic compact elliptic surface has at least 6 quadratic points, a compact elliptic surface with semi-homogeneous cubic forms has at least 2 quadratic points and the number of quadratic points in a hyperbolic disc is odd. By studying the behavior of the cubic form in a neighborhood of the parabolic curve, we also obtain a relation between the indices of the quadratic points of a generic surface with non-empty elliptic and hyperbolic regions.