The problem of Apollonius is one of the earliest examples of enumerative geometry. This problem asks for the number and construction of circles that are tangent to three given circles, points or lines. In general, the problem for three given circles has eight solutions, which can be seen as 23, each tangency condition imposing a quadratic condition on the space of circles. However, for special arrangements of the given circles, the number of solutions may also be any integer from 0 to six; there is no arrangement for which there are seven solutions to Apollonius' problem.
Key tools
A number of tools, ranging from the elementary to the more advanced, include:
Enumerative geometry is very closely tied to intersection theory.
Schubert calculus
Enumerative geometry saw spectacular development towards the end of the nineteenth century, at the hands of Hermann Schubert. He introduced for the purpose the Schubert calculus, which has proved of fundamental geometrical and topological value in broader areas. The specific needs of enumerative geometry were not addressed until some further attention was paid to them in the 1960s and 1970s. Intersection numbers had been rigorously defined, but this did not exhaust the proper domain of enumerative questions.
Naïve application of dimension counting and Bézout's theorem yields incorrect results, as the following example shows. In response to these problems, algebraic geometers introduced vague "fudge factors", which were only rigorously justified decades later. As an example, count the conic sections tangent to five given lines in the projective plane. The conics constitute a projective space of dimension 5, taking their six coefficients as homogeneous coordinates, and five points determine a conic, if the points are in general linear position, as passing through a given point imposes a linear condition. Similarly, tangency to a given line L is one quadratic condition, so determined a quadric in P5. However the linear system of divisorsconsisting of all such quadrics is not without a base locus. In fact each such quadric contains the Veronese surface, which parametrizes the conics called 'double lines'. This is because a double line intersects every line inthe plane, since lines in the projective plane intersect, with multiplicity two because it is doubled, and thus satisfies the same intersection condition as a nondegenerate conic that is tangent to the line. The general Bézout theorem says 5 general quadrics in 5-space will intersect in 32 = 25 points. But the relevant quadrics here are not in general position. From 32, 31 must be subtracted and attributed to the Veronese, to leave the correct answer, namely 1. This process of attributing intersections to 'degenerate' cases is a typical geometric introduction of a ''. Hilbert's fifteenth problem was to overcome the apparently arbitrary nature of these interventions; this aspect goes beyond the foundational question of the Schubert calculus itself.
Clemens conjecture
In 1984 H. Clemens studied the counting of the number of rational curves on a quintic threefold and reached the following conjecture. This conjecture has been resolved in the case, but is still open for higher. In 1991 the paper about mirror symmetry on the quintic threefold in from the string theoretical viewpoint gives numbers of degree d rational curves on for all. Prior to this, algebraic geometers could calculate these numbers only for.
Examples
Some of the historically important examples of enumerations in algebraic geometry include:
2 The number of lines meeting 4 general lines in space
8 The number of circles tangent to 3 general circles.
