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Gaussian curvature is an intrinsic measure of curvature, meaning that it could in principle be measured by a 2-dimensional being living entirely within the surface, because it depends only on distances that are measured “within” or along the surface, not on the way it is isometrically embedded in Euclidean space.
The Gaussian curvature of the surface is then given by the second order deviation of the metric at the point from the Euclidean metric. In particular the Gaussian curvature is an invariant of the metric, Gauss's celebrated Theorema Egregium. A convenient way to understand the curvature comes from an ordinary differential equation, first ...
Furthermore, a surface which evolves under the mean curvature of the surface , is said to obey a heat-type equation called the mean curvature flow equation. The sphere is the only embedded surface of constant positive mean curvature without boundary or singularities. However, the result is not true when the condition "embedded surface" is ...
The product k 1 k 2 of the two principal curvatures is the Gaussian curvature, K, and the average (k 1 + k 2)/2 is the mean curvature, H. If at least one of the principal curvatures is zero at every point, then the Gaussian curvature will be 0 and the surface is a developable surface. For a minimal surface, the mean curvature is zero at every ...
Gaussian curvature is an intrinsic property of the surface, meaning it does not depend on the particular embedding of the surface; intuitively, this means that ants living on the surface could determine the Gaussian curvature. For example, an ant living on a sphere could measure the sum of the interior angles of a triangle and determine that it ...
The Gaussian curvature of a surface is given by = =, where L, M, and N are the coefficients of the second fundamental form. Theorema egregium of Gauss states that the Gaussian curvature of a surface can be expressed solely in terms of the first fundamental form and its derivatives, so that K is in fact an intrinsic invariant of the surface.
The Gaussian curvature K = κ 1 κ 2 and the mean curvature H = (κ 1 + κ 2)/2 can be computed as follows: =, = + (). Up to a sign, these quantities are independent of the parametrization used, and hence form important tools for analysing the geometry of the surface.
Observe that the mean curvature is a trace, or average, of the second fundamental form, for any given component. Sometimes mean curvature is defined by multiplying the sum on the right-hand side by /. We can now write the Gauss–Codazzi equations as