On Undulation Invariants of Plane Curves

One of the general problems in algebraic geometry is to determine algorithmically whether or not a given geometric object, defined by explicit polynomial equations (e.g. a curve or a surface), satisfies a given property (e.g. has singularities or other distinctive features of interest). A classical example of such a problem, described by A.Cayley and G.Salmon in 1852, is to determine whether or not a given plane curve of degree r > 3 has undulation points -- the points where the tangent line meets the curve with multiplicity four. They proved that there exists an invariant of degree 6(r - 3)(3 r - 2) that vanishes if and only if the curve has undulation points. In this paper we give explicit formulae for this invariant in the case of quartics (r=4) and quintics (r=5), expressing it as the determinant of a matrix with polynomial entries, of sizes 21 times 21 and 36 times 36 respectively.