Birational involutions of the real projective plane

Abstract

We classify birational involutions of the real projective plane up to conjugation. In contrast with an analogous classification over the complex numbers (due to E. Bertini, G. Castelnuovo, F. Enriques, L. Bayle and A. Beauville), which includes 4 different classes of involutions, we discover 12 different classes over the reals, and provide many examples when the fixed curve of an involution does not determine its conjugacy class in the real plane Cremona group.