TITLE: What is the state of research on Horn Angles?
QUESTION [5 upvotes]: The ancient Greeks struggled with the concept of a horn angle, the "angle" formed by the intersection of two curves.  The only information I find in Mathworld is that horn angles are examples of non-Archimedean geometry.  Where can I find out more about them?  What work has been done on them, and what is the current state of knowledge on them?
Since they are part of non-Archimedean geometry, can they be understood using the hyperreal numbers or some other non-standard model of the first-order theory of real closed fields?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.  Thank You in Advance.

REPLY [3 votes]: A quick perusal of Math Reviews leads one to suspect that not much research goes on. (A better perusal might show otherwise). For Euclid a "line" was a curve and an "angle" was a Horn Angle.  But  he actually only looked at angles formed by lines except for  Book III proposition 16 where he essentially commented that the angle formed by a circle and a tangent line is positive but less than any linear angle. Maybe he did not do much more because  Horn angles are pretty tough;  Unlike linear angles, it is hard to know how to add them or even double one (in a geometrically meaningful way). I'm not even sure how to say when one contains another. In modern times Knasner studied them using somewhat advanced notions of differential geometry (the references above are good) with latest paper in 1951 (dealing with  trisection of Horn Angles). After that there is a paper from 1968 and the mentioned one from 2008 (along with some historical papers).
I think that Horn Angles might inform non-standard models more than vice versa. One does not need non-standard models to talk about the order on rational functions (or more general classes of functions) based on their behavior as $x\to\infty$. It is essentially the same to look at behavior as $x\to 0^+$ and that is pretty much the order of Horn Angles.