What should an undergraduate student need to know before being able to read Michael Atiyah's A Note on the Tangents of a Twisted Cubic ?
Most of the words in the paper look foreign to me, but I'm very intrigued by the objects involved (Veronese surface, twisted cubic, rational normal cubic). Furthermore, the geometry involved looks very synthetic, the paper doesn't use any abstract algebra at all. The arguments look very much like the proofs in high school Euclidean geometry.
Are there any books which teach this kind of geometry? Preferably, the books should require as few prerequisites as possible (undergraduate linear algebra should be fine, but if it doesn't, then all the better), and it should also contain nice pictures, but I suspect that older geometry books lack pretty pictures.