Degenerations of elliptic curves and cusp singularities

Abstract

We give more or less explicit equations for all two-dimensional cusp singularities of embedding dimension at least 4. They are closely related to Felix Klein's equations for universal curves with level n structure. The main technical result is a description of the versal deformation of an n-gon in $P^{n-1}$. The final section contains the equations for smoothings of simple elliptic singularities (of multiplicity at most 9).