We study the arithmetic of so-called primary Burniat surfaces, a family of surfaces of general type arising as smooth bidouble covers of a del Pezzo surface of degree 6 and at the same time as étale quotients of certain hypersurfaces in a product of three elliptic curves. We give a new explicit description of their moduli space and determine their possible automorphism groups. We also give an e...

Rational double points are the simplest surface singularities. In this essay we will be mainly concerned with the geometry of the exceptional set corresponding to the resolution of a rational double point. We will derive the classification of rational double points in terms of Dynkin diagrams.