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Catalan's Minimal Surface
In differential geometry, Catalan's minimal surface is a minimal surface originally studied by Eugène Charles Catalan in 1855. It has the special property of being the minimal surface that contains a cycloid as a geodesic. It is also ''swept out'' by a family of parabolae. The surface has the mathematical characteristics exemplified by the following parametric equation In mathematics, a parametric equation defines a group of quantities as functions of one or more independent variables called parameters. Parametric equations are commonly used to express the coordinates of the points that make up a geometric ...:Gray, A. "Catalan's Minimal Surface." Modern Differential Geometry of Curves and Surfaces with Mathematica, 2nd ed. Boca Raton, Florida: CRC Press, pp. 692–693, 1997 :\begin x(u,v) &= u - \sin(u)\cosh(v)\\ y(u,v) &= 1 - \cos(u)\cosh(v)\\ z(u,v) &= 4 \sin(u/2) \sinh(v/2) \end External links * Weisstein, Eric W. "Catalan's Surface." From MathWorld—A Wolfr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Differential Geometry
Differential geometry is a mathematical discipline that studies the geometry of smooth shapes and smooth spaces, otherwise known as smooth manifolds. It uses the techniques of differential calculus, integral calculus, linear algebra and multilinear algebra. The field has its origins in the study of spherical geometry as far back as antiquity. It also relates to astronomy, the geodesy of the Earth, and later the study of hyperbolic geometry by Lobachevsky. The simplest examples of smooth spaces are the plane and space curves and surfaces in the three-dimensional Euclidean space, and the study of these shapes formed the basis for development of modern differential geometry during the 18th and 19th centuries. Since the late 19th century, differential geometry has grown into a field concerned more generally with geometric structures on differentiable manifolds. A geometric structure is one which defines some notion of size, distance, shape, volume, or other rigidifying str ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Minimal Surface
In mathematics, a minimal surface is a surface that locally minimizes its area. This is equivalent to having zero mean curvature (see definitions below). The term "minimal surface" is used because these surfaces originally arose as surfaces that minimized total surface area subject to some constraint. Physical models of area-minimizing minimal surfaces can be made by dipping a wire frame into a soap solution, forming a soap film, which is a minimal surface whose boundary is the wire frame. However, the term is used for more general surfaces that may self-intersect or do not have constraints. For a given constraint there may also exist several minimal surfaces with different areas (for example, see minimal surface of revolution): the standard definitions only relate to a local optimum, not a global optimum. Definitions Minimal surfaces can be defined in several equivalent ways in R3. The fact that they are equivalent serves to demonstrate how minimal surface theory lies at ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Eugène Charles Catalan
Eugène Charles Catalan (30 May 1814 – 14 February 1894) was a French and Belgian mathematician who worked on continued fractions, descriptive geometry, number theory and combinatorics. His notable contributions included discovering a periodic minimal surface in the space \mathbb^3; stating the famous Catalan's conjecture, which was eventually proved in 2002; and, introducing the Catalan number to solve a combinatorial problem. Biography Catalan was born in Bruges (now in Belgium, then under Dutch rule even though the Kingdom of the Netherlands had not yet been formally instituted), the only child of a French jeweller by the name of Joseph Catalan, in 1814. In 1825, he traveled to Paris and learned mathematics at École Polytechnique, where he met Joseph Liouville (1833). In December 1834 he was expelled along with most of the students in his year for political reasons; he resumed his studies in January 1835, graduated that summer, and went on to teach at Châlons-sur-Marn ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cycloid
In geometry, a cycloid is the curve traced by a point on a circle as it rolls along a straight line without slipping. A cycloid is a specific form of trochoid and is an example of a roulette, a curve generated by a curve rolling on another curve. The cycloid, with the cusps pointing upward, is the curve of fastest descent under uniform gravity (the brachistochrone curve). It is also the form of a curve for which the period of an object in simple harmonic motion (rolling up and down repetitively) along the curve does not depend on the object's starting position (the tautochrone curve). History The cycloid has been called "The Helen of Geometers" as it caused frequent quarrels among 17th-century mathematicians. Historians of mathematics have proposed several candidates for the discoverer of the cycloid. Mathematical historian Paul Tannery cited similar work by the Syrian philosopher Iamblichus as evidence that the curve was known in antiquity. English mathemati ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Geodesic
In geometry, a geodesic () is a curve representing in some sense the shortest path ( arc) between two points in a surface, or more generally in a Riemannian manifold. The term also has meaning in any differentiable manifold with a connection. It is a generalization of the notion of a "straight line". The noun '' geodesic'' and the adjective '' geodetic'' come from ''geodesy'', the science of measuring the size and shape of Earth, though many of the underlying principles can be applied to any ellipsoidal geometry. In the original sense, a geodesic was the shortest route between two points on the Earth's surface. For a spherical Earth, it is a segment of a great circle (see also great-circle distance). The term has since been generalized to more abstract mathematical spaces; for example, in graph theory, one might consider a geodesic between two vertices/nodes of a graph. In a Riemannian manifold or submanifold, geodesics are characterised by the property of having vanis ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sweep Line Algorithm
In computational geometry, a sweep line algorithm or plane sweep algorithm is an algorithmic paradigm that uses a conceptual ''sweep line'' or ''sweep surface'' to solve various problems in Euclidean space. It is one of the key techniques in computational geometry. The idea behind algorithms of this type is to imagine that a line (often a vertical line) is swept or moved across the plane, stopping at some points. Geometric operations are restricted to geometric objects that either intersect or are in the immediate vicinity of the sweep line whenever it stops, and the complete solution is available once the line has passed over all objects. History This approach may be traced to scanline algorithms of rendering in computer graphics, followed by exploiting this approach in early algorithms of integrated circuit layout design, in which a geometric description of an IC was processed in parallel strips, because the entire description could not fit into memory. Applications Applicatio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Parabola
In mathematics, a parabola is a plane curve which is mirror-symmetrical and is approximately U-shaped. It fits several superficially different mathematical descriptions, which can all be proved to define exactly the same curves. One description of a parabola involves a point (the focus) and a line (the directrix). The focus does not lie on the directrix. The parabola is the locus of points in that plane that are equidistant from both the directrix and the focus. Another description of a parabola is as a conic section, created from the intersection of a right circular conical surface and a plane parallel to another plane that is tangential to the conical surface. The line perpendicular to the directrix and passing through the focus (that is, the line that splits the parabola through the middle) is called the "axis of symmetry". The point where the parabola intersects its axis of symmetry is called the " vertex" and is the point where the parabola is most sharply cu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Parametric Equation
In mathematics, a parametric equation defines a group of quantities as functions of one or more independent variables called parameters. Parametric equations are commonly used to express the coordinates of the points that make up a geometric object such as a curve or surface, in which case the equations are collectively called a parametric representation or parameterization (alternatively spelled as parametrisation) of the object. For example, the equations :\begin x &= \cos t \\ y &= \sin t \end form a parametric representation of the unit circle, where ''t'' is the parameter: A point (''x'', ''y'') is on the unit circle if and only if there is a value of ''t'' such that these two equations generate that point. Sometimes the parametric equations for the individual scalar output variables are combined into a single parametric equation in vectors: :(x, y)=(\cos t, \sin t). Parametric representations are generally nonunique (see the "Examples in two dimensions" section ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Minimal Surfaces
In mathematics, a minimal surface is a surface that locally minimizes its area. This is equivalent to having zero mean curvature (see definitions below). The term "minimal surface" is used because these surfaces originally arose as surfaces that minimized total surface area subject to some constraint. Physical models of area-minimizing minimal surfaces can be made by dipping a wire frame into a soap solution, forming a soap film, which is a minimal surface whose boundary is the wire frame. However, the term is used for more general surfaces that may self-intersect or do not have constraints. For a given constraint there may also exist several minimal surfaces with different areas (for example, see minimal surface of revolution): the standard definitions only relate to a local optimum, not a global optimum. Definitions Minimal surfaces can be defined in several equivalent ways in R3. The fact that they are equivalent serves to demonstrate how minimal surface theory lies a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
