Abstract:
Motivated by potential applications in architecture, we study surfaces in
3-dimensional Euclidean space containing several circles through each point.
Finding all such surfaces is a challenging open problem. We provide some
bright examples and reduce the problem to a nice algebraic problem of
finding Pythagorean n-tuples of polynomials.
Our main tools is a generalization of the Schicho theorem on the
parametrization of the surfaces containing two conics through each point. We
are going to state and prove several lemmas to the theorem.
A substantial part of the talk is elementary and is accessible even for high
school students. Several open problems are stated.