First to Illuminate
“From the History of a Simple Group” (pdf), by Jeremy Gray:
“The American mathematician A. B. Coble [1908; 1913]* seems to have been the first to illuminate the 27 lines and 28 bitangents with the elementary theory of geometries over finite fields.
The combinatorial aspects of all this are pleasant, but the mathematics is certainly not easy.”
* [Coble 1908] A. Coble, “A configuration in finite geometry isomorphic with that of the 27 lines on a cubic surface,” Johns Hopkins University Circular 7:80-88 (1908), 736-744.
[Coble 1913] A. Coble, “An application of finite geometry to the characteristic theory of the odd and even theta functions,” Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 14 (1913), 241-276.
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