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Illustration of tangential and normal components of a vector to a surface. In mathematics, given a vector at a point on a curve, that vector can be decomposed uniquely as a sum of two vectors, one tangent to the curve, called the tangential component of the vector, and another one perpendicular to the curve, called the normal component of the vector.
More specifically, the formulas describe the derivatives of the so-called tangent, normal, and binormal unit vectors in terms of each other. The formulas are named after the two French mathematicians who independently discovered them: Jean Frédéric Frenet , in his thesis of 1847, and Joseph Alfred Serret , in 1851.
The method hinges on the observation that the radius of a circle is always normal to the circle itself. With this in mind Descartes would construct a circle that was tangent to a given curve. He could then use the radius at the point of intersection to find the slope of a normal line, and from this one can easily find the slope of a tangent line.
Furthermore, because some of the frame vectors f 1...f p are tangent to M while the others are normal, the structure equations naturally split into their tangential and normal contributions. [3] Let the lowercase Latin indices a , b , c range from 1 to p (i.e., the tangential indices) and the Greek indices μ, γ range from p +1 to n (i.e., the ...
In mathematics, a tangent vector is a vector that is tangent to a curve or surface at a given point. Tangent vectors are described in the differential geometry of curves in the context of curves in R n. More generally, tangent vectors are elements of a tangent space of a differentiable manifold. Tangent vectors can also be described in terms of ...
A typical example of a differential equation with a saddle-node bifurcation is: = +. Here is the state variable and is the bifurcation parameter.. If < there are two equilibrium points, a stable equilibrium point at and an unstable one at +.
A failed attempt to comb a hairy 3-ball (2-sphere), leaving a tuft at each pole A hairy doughnut (2-torus), on the other hand, is quite easily combable. A continuous tangent vector field on a 2-sphere with only one pole, in this case a dipole field with index 2.
The same idea underlies the solution of a first order equation as an integral of the Monge cone. [5] The Monge cone is a cone field in the R n+1 of the (x,u) variables cut out by the envelope of the tangent spaces to the first order PDE at each point. A solution of the PDE is then an envelope of the cone field.