The platonic elliptic surfaces

Abstract: We construct certain special rational elliptic surfaces with four reduced singular fibres that are naturally attached to the platonic solids and belong to a group of surfaces complementing the well-known semi-stable Beauville surfaces. We describe the basic algebraic geometric properties of these surfaces, their associated Picard-Fuchs operators, integer sequences, Laurent polynomial representations and Apéry constants. On the arithmetic side, we discover the need for a refinement of the Dwork-expansion used to find the Euler factors of the fibres of these fibrations. This is explained by comparing the $q$-coordinates coming from the elliptic curve and the $q$-coordinate of the Picard-Fuchs equation and is also directly reflected in the shape of the monodromy matrices in the Frobenius basis.