Computing hypercircles by moving hyperplanes (Q1930183)

This article deals with the efficient computation of hypercircles, which are defined as follows: Let \(\mathbb{K}\) be an algebraically closed field of characteristic zero,\(\,\mathbb{F}\) an algebraic closure of \(\mathbb{K}\) and \(\alpha\in\mathbb{F},\) algebraic over \(\mathbb{K}\) of degree \(n\). Let \(t\) be a new variable, if \(\frac{r_1t+r_2}{r_3t+r_4}\in\mathbb{K}(\alpha)(t)\) defines an isomorphism on \(\mathbb{F}(t),\) and we expand it as follows \[ \frac{r_1t+r_2}{r_3t+r_4}=\lambda_0(t)+\lambda_1(t)\,\alpha+\ldots+\lambda_{n-1}(t)\alpha^{n-1} \] with \(\lambda_i(t)\in\mathbb{K}(t),\) the \textit{hypercircle} associated to this rational function for the extension \(\mathbb{K}\subset\mathbb{K}(\alpha)\) is the parametric curve in \(\mathbb{F}^n\) given by the parametrization \((\lambda_0(t),\ldots,\lambda_{n-1}(t))\). Hypercircles have been introduced in [\textit{C. Andradas, T. Recio} and \textit{J. R. Sendra}, ``Base field restriction techniques for parametric curves''. Proceedings of the 1999 International Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation (Vancouver, BC), 17-22, ACM, New York, (1999)] as an auxiliary tool to solve the problem on whether a given curve can be defined and/or parametrized over an optimal field. Indeed, given a proper parametrization of a rational curve \(\mathcal{C}\) with coefficients in \(\mathbb{K}(\alpha),\) there is an hypercircle associated to this parametrization. Computations of hypercircles are easy from a symbolic point of view, but for practical applications the naive algorithms turn out to be very heavy. The paper under review presents an algorithm based on interpolation to produce a fast outcome. The algorithms takes into account the structure of the conjugate curves of \(\mathcal{C}\), and avoids making computations in the normal closure of \(\mathbb{K}(\alpha)\) over \(\mathbb{K}.\) In this way, a lot of extra heavy load is avoided. The complexity and running time of the algorithm is analyzed at the end of the paper, and examples are presented to illustrate them.