  A shape in the plane is an equivalence class of sufficiently smooth Jordan
curves, where two curves are equivalent if one can be obtained from the other
by a translation and a scaling. The fingerprint of a shape is an equivalence of
orientation preserving diffeomorphisms of the unit circle, where two
diffeomorphisms are equivalent if they differ by right composition with an
automorphism of the unit disk. The fingerprint is obtained by composing Riemann
maps onto the interior and exterior of a representative of a shape in a
suitable way. In this paper, we show that there is a one-to-one correspondence
between shapes defined by polynomial lemniscates of degree n and nth roots of
Blaschke products of degree n. The facts that lemniscates approximate all
Jordan curves in the Hausdorff metric and roots of Blaschke products
approximate all orientation preserving diffeomorphisms of the circle in the
C^1-norm suggest that lemniscates and roots of Blaschke products are natural
objects to study in the theory of shapes and their fingerprints.
