112 lines on smooth quartic surfaces (characteristic 3)

Abstract

Over a field k of characteristic 3, we prove that there are no smooth quartic surfaces S in IP^3 with more than 112 lines. Moreover, the surface with 112 lines is projectively equivalent over k-bar to the Fermat quartic. As a key ingredient, we derive a characteristic free upper bound for the number of lines met by a quadric on a smooth quartic surface.