TITLE: Curves embedding in plane
QUESTION [8 upvotes]: Given two closed simple(no self-intersection point) curves $C_1,C_2$ in the plane $\mathbb R^2$, is there a good way to judge whether one curve can be embedded inside the other one, here embedding inside means by  translation and rotation one curve can be put inside the area circled by the other one.
Ps: You could give some advice for such computation.
Thank you.

REPLY [6 votes]: Long ago Chazelle studied the polygonal version of your question, and obtained
a polynomial-time algorithm, polynomial in the number of vertices:

Bernard Chazelle, "The polygon containment problem,"
  in Advances in Computing Research, Vol I: Computational
  Geometry, (F.P. Preparata, ed.), JAI
  Press, Greenwich, Connecticut (1983), 1–33.

If both polygons have $n$ vertices and neither can be assumed
convex, the polynomial is $O(n^7 \log n).$
If both are convex, then the complexity is reduced to $O(n^3)$.
Subsequently his results have been improved in various ways.
For example, the time complexity in the general case
was reduced by Avnaim & Boissonnat by a factor of $n$.1
Google scholar lists
more than 100 papers that cite the original.
One application is 
cartography: placing labels inside map regions:

           



Fig.1(b) from Aonuma, H., Imai, H., Imai, K., & Tokuyama, T. "Maximin location of convex objects in a polygon and related dynamic Voronoi diagrams." In Proc. 6th Symposium Computational Geometry, 1990, pp. 225-234. ACM link.


1Avnaim, Francis, and Jean Daniel Boissonnat. "Polygon placement under translation and rotation." Annual Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science. Springer Berlin Heidelberg, 1988.