A remark on parameterizing nonsingular cubic surfaces

Extending a geometric construction due to Sederberg and to Bajaj, Holt, and Netravali, an algorithm is presented for parameterizing a nonsingular cubic surface by polynomials of degree three. The fact that such a parametrization exists is classical. The present algorithm is, by its purely geometric nature, a very natural one. Moreover, it contains a practical way of finding all lines in an implicitly given cubic surface. Two explicit examples are presented, namely the classical Clebsch diagonal surface and the cubic Fermat surface.