Fundamental limitations on projective invariants of planar curves

Abstract

In this paper, some fundamental limitations of projective invariants of non-algebraic planar curves are discussed. It is shown that all curves within a large class can be mapped arbitrarily close to a circle by projective transformations. It is also shown that arbitrarily close to each of a finite number of closed planar curves there is one member of a set of projectively equivalent curves. Thus a continuous projective invariant on closed curves is constant. This also limits the possibility of finding so called projective normalisation schemes for closed planar curves.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>