Floppy Curves with Applications to Real Algebraic Curves

We show how one may sometimes perform singular ambient surgery on the complex locus of a real algebraic curve and obtain what we call a floppy curve. A floppy curve is a certain kind of singular surface in CP (2), more general than the complex locus of a real nodal curve. We derive analogs for floppy curves of known restrictions on real nodal curves. In particular we derive analogs of Fiedler’s congruence for certain nonsingular curves and Viro’s inequalities for nodal curves which generalize those of Arnold and Petrovskii for nonsingular curves. We also obtain a determinant condition for certain curves which are extremal with respect to some of these equalities. One may prohibit certain schemes for real algebraic curves by prohibiting the floppy curves which result from singular ambient surgery. In this way, we give a new proof of Shustin’s prohibition of the scheme 1 < 2 ∐ 1 < 18 >> for a real algebraic curve of degree eight.