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Radius of curvature and center of curvature. In differential geometry, the radius of curvature, R, is the reciprocal of the curvature. For a curve, it equals the radius of the circular arc which best approximates the curve at that point. For surfaces, the radius of curvature is the radius of a circle that best fits a normal section or ...
An osculating circle is a circle that best approximates the curvature of a curve at a specific point. It is tangent to the curve at that point and has the same curvature as the curve at that point. [2] The osculating circle provides a way to understand the local behavior of a curve and is commonly used in differential geometry and calculus.
The following can be used to find the versine of a given constant radius curve: [2] The Hallade method is to use the chord to continuously measure the versine in an overlapping pattern along the curve. The versine values for the perfect circular curve would have the same number. [3]
Historically, the curvature of a differentiable curve was defined through the osculating circle, which is the circle that best approximates the curve at a point. More precisely, given a point P on a curve, every other point Q of the curve defines a circle (or sometimes a line) passing through Q and tangent to the curve at P.
An inversion in their tangent point with respect to a circle of appropriate radius transforms the two touching given circles into two parallel lines, and the third given circle into another circle. Thus, the solutions may be found by sliding a circle of constant radius between two parallel lines until it contacts the transformed third circle.
In this case, one gets a parallel curve on the opposite side of the curve (see diagram on the parallel curves of a circle). One can easily check that a parallel curve of a line is a parallel line in the common sense, and the parallel curve of a circle is a concentric circle.
A diagram illustrating great-circle distance (drawn in red) between two points on a sphere, P and Q. Two antipodal points, u and v are also shown. The great-circle distance, orthodromic distance, or spherical distance is the distance between two points on a sphere, measured along the great-circle arc between them. This arc is the shortest path ...
The power of a point is a special case of the Darboux product between two circles, which is given by [10] | | where A 1 and A 2 are the centers of the two circles and r 1 and r 2 are their radii. The power of a point arises in the special case that one of the radii is zero.