Roman surface

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In mathematics, the Roman surface or Steiner surface is a self-intersecting mapping of the real projective plane into three-dimensional space, with an unusually high degree of symmetry. This mapping is not an immersion of the projective plane; however, the figure resulting from removing six singular points is one. Its name arises because it was discovered by Jakob Steiner when he was in Rome in 1844.^[1]

The simplest construction is as the image of a sphere centered at the origin under the map ${\displaystyle f(x,y,z)=(yz,xz,xy).}$ This gives an implicit formula of

${\displaystyle x^{2}y^{2}+y^{2}z^{2}+z^{2}x^{2}-r^{2}xyz=0.\,}$

Also, taking a parametrization of the sphere in terms of longitude (θ) and latitude (φ), gives parametric equations for the Roman surface as follows:

${\displaystyle x=r^{2}\cos \theta \cos \varphi \sin \varphi }$

${\displaystyle y=r^{2}\sin \theta \cos \varphi \sin \varphi }$

${\displaystyle z=r^{2}\cos \theta \sin \theta \cos ^{2}\varphi }$

The origin is a triple point, and each of the xy-, yz-, and xz-planes are tangential to the surface there. The other places of self-intersection are double points, defining segments along each coordinate axis which terminate in six pinch points. The entire surface has tetrahedral symmetry. It is a particular type (called type 1) of Steiner surface, that is, a 3-dimensional linear projection of the Veronese surface.