Line Congruences of Low Order

Abstract

A line congruence is an irreducible subvariety of dimension n−1 in the Grassmannian of lines in Pn. There are two numerical invariants associated to a line congruence: the order, which is the number of lines passing through a general point of Pn, and the class, which is the number of lines of the congruence contained in a general hyperplaneH and meeting a general line inH. The paper reviews the classification of line congruences of order 0 and 1, and then gives some new results online congruences of order 2 in P3, which is a work in progress. The last section states some open questions.