A new approach for computing the asymptotes of a parametric curve (Q2279896)

Asymptotes play an important role in rendering and sketching curves. Given an algebraic curve $\mathcal C$ in the plane, we may think of an asymptote as a line tangent to $\mathcal C$ at infinity. This concept of an asymptote can be extended to that of a so-called generalized asymptote: an algebraic curves $\tilde{\mathcal C}$ of minimal degree such that the distance between $\mathcal C$ and $\tilde{\mathcal C}$ tends to 0 as the curves tend to infinity. Clearly the degree of a generalized asymptote is bounded by the degree of $\mathcal C$. The authors present algorithms for computing generalized asymptotes for algebraic curves given implicitly by a defining polynomials or explicitly by a rational parametrization. For the parametric case this means the computation of infinity branches and local parametrization in terms of Puiseux series. They also present an improved version of the parametric case, avoiding the computation of infinity brances and Puiseux series, and replacing these considerations by the computation of simple limits.