CURVATURE OF CURVES AND SURFACES – A （曲线和曲面的曲率- A）.pdf

CURVATURE OF CURVES AND SURFACES – A PARABOLIC APPROACH ZVI HAR’EL Parabolas and paraboloids are used to introduce curvature, both qualitatively and quantitatively. 1. Most of the standard differential geometry textbooks recognize the oscu- lating paraboloid as a useful interpretation of the second fundamental form of a surface. This interpretation leads to some qualitative conclusions about the shape of the surface in consideration [9, pp.87,91]. Two extensions are usually ignored: (a) The osculating paraboloid has a planar counterpart, the osculating parabola to a curve in 2 . This fact is mentioned only in passing as an exercise [5, p.26] [4, p.47], if at all. (b) The fact that the osculating paraboloid may be used to produce con- crete quantitative results, such as formulas for the Gaussian curvature and the mean curvature of a surface, or even Meusnier’s formula for the curva- ture of skew planar sections. With these observations in mind, we introduce a unified approach to curvature in two or three dimensions using quadratic approximation as the fundamental concept. Geometrically, we define curvature of a planar curve as the reciprocal of the semi-latus-rectum of the osculating parabola, instead of considering the familiar rate of change in direction of the tangent. The latter approach is easily visualized via the osculating circle, which, however, does not lend itself to generalization to higher dimensions, since surfaces have no osculating spheres (at non-umbilical points, of course). In contrast, osculating parabolas to curves in 2 are easily and naturally generalized to osculating paraboloids to hypersurfaces in . It should be admitted that by rejecting the use of parametric represen