Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Curving Towards Bézout: An Examination Of Plane Curves And Their Intersection, Camron Alexander Robey Cohen

Honors Papers

One area of interest in studying plane curves is intersection. Namely, given two plane curves, we are interested in understanding how they intersect. In this paper, we will build the machinery necessary to describe this intersection. Our discussion will include developing algebraic tools, describing how two curves intersect at a given point, and accounting for points at infinity by way of projective space. With all these tools, we will prove Bézout’s theorem, a robust description of the intersection between two curves relating the degrees of the defining polynomials to the number of points in the intersection.