The ubiquitous ellipse (Q1897268)

It is well known that the shortening of a plane curve by heat flow shrinks a curve to a ``circular point'', i.e., the curve shrinks to a point, and if the successive curves of evolution are subjected to a homothety that yields a curve of fixed area, then the transformed curves approach a circle. The first author and \textit{A. Tannenbaum} have shown [Affine shortening of non-convex plane curves, Publ. 845, Dept. of Electrical Engineering, Technion, Haifa 1992; see also J. Funct. Anal. 119, 79-120 (1994; Zbl 0801.53008)] that the same result holds if the curve is parametrized by equiaffine arclength subjected to affine invariant heat flow. Here the authors consider polygons that are changed by a discretized form of the evolutoin equation applied to the vertices where it can be expressed as transformation in barycentric coordinates and therefore is affine invariant. (The authors' argument about affine arclength is invalid). They show that in this flow the original polygon converges to its centroid and the approximating polygons, if normalized for constant area, converge to an ellipse. This procedure is then transferred to curves given by \(B\)-splines and the essential arguments and result turn out to be still true.