Detecting Symmetries of Rational Plane and Space Curves

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of determining the symmetries of a plane or space curve defined by a rational parametrization. We provide effective methods to compute the involution and rotation symmetries for the planar case. As for space curves, our method finds the involutions in all cases, and all the rotation symmetries in the particular case of Pythagorean-hodograph curves. Our algorithms solve these problems without converting to implicit form. Instead, we make use of a relationship between two proper parametrizations of the same curve, which leads to algorithms that involve only univariate polynomials. These algorithms have been implemented and tested in the Sage system.