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On plane curves and such

Student-Run Research Seminar

Speaker: Emi Arima, UC Davis
Location: 2112 MSB
Start time: Wed, Apr 23 2008, 12:10PM

In the 1960's Fabricius-Bjerre published an elegant paper about plane curves. For a given plane curve (smooth immersion of the circle in the plane), he found a surprisingly simple relation between the number of tangents, the number of inflection points and the number of crossings. This result has a nice proof, which I intend to cover. I also hope to show how this relation can be extended to curves in RP^2. Fabricius-Bjerre, Fr: On the double tangents of lane closed curves. Math. Scand. 11 (1962), 113-116