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Smaller circles bend more sharply, and hence have higher curvature. The curvature at a point of a differentiable curve is the curvature of its osculating circle — that is, the circle that best approximates the curve near this point. The curvature of a straight line is zero. In contrast to the tangent, which is a vector quantity, the curvature ...
A plane curve with non-vanishing curvature has zero torsion at all points. Conversely, if the torsion of a regular curve with non-vanishing curvature is identically zero, then this curve belongs to a fixed plane. The curvature and the torsion of a helix are constant. Conversely, any space curve whose curvature and torsion are both constant and ...
For a surface defined in 3D space, the mean curvature is related to a unit normal of the surface: = ^ where the normal chosen affects the sign of the curvature. The sign of the curvature depends on the choice of normal: the curvature is positive if the surface curves "towards" the normal.
The Gauss map provides a mapping from every point on a curve or a surface to a corresponding point on a unit sphere. In this example, the curvature of a 2D-surface is mapped onto a 1D unit circle. In differential geometry , the Gauss map of a surface is a function that maps each point in the surface to a unit vector that is orthogonal to the ...
One of the most important tools used to analyze a curve is the Frenet frame, a moving frame that provides a coordinate system at each point of the curve that is "best adapted" to the curve near that point. The theory of curves is much simpler and narrower in scope than the theory of surfaces and its higher-dimensional generalizations because a ...
A space curve; the vectors T, N, B; and the osculating plane spanned by T and N. In differential geometry, the Frenet–Serret formulas describe the kinematic properties of a particle moving along a differentiable curve in three-dimensional Euclidean space, or the geometric properties of the curve itself irrespective of any motion.
At any point on a surface, we can find a normal vector that is at right angles to the surface; planes containing the normal vector are called normal planes. The intersection of a normal plane and the surface will form a curve called a normal section and the curvature of this curve is the normal curvature .
This equation says that the vector tangent to the curve at any point x(t) along the curve is precisely the vector F(x(t)), and so the curve x(t) is tangent at each point to the vector field F. If a given vector field is Lipschitz continuous, then the Picard–Lindelöf theorem implies that there exists a unique flow for small time.