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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 combinations thereof. [1] [2] [3]
A circular segment (in green) is enclosed between a secant/chord (the dashed line) and the arc whose endpoints equal the chord's (the arc shown above the green area). In geometry, a circular segment or disk segment (symbol: ⌓) is a region of a disk [1] which is "cut off" from the rest of the disk by a straight line.
It is generated by a curve that lies in the half-plane and connects the two points; among all the surfaces that can be generated in this way, it is the one that minimizes the surface area. [1] A basic problem in the calculus of variations is finding the curve between two points that produces this minimal surface of revolution. [1]
A chord (from the Latin chorda, meaning "bowstring") of a circle is a straight line segment whose endpoints both lie on a circular arc. If a chord were to be extended infinitely on both directions into a line, the object is a secant line. The perpendicular line passing through the chord's midpoint is called sagitta (Latin for "arrow").
The curve of the chains of a suspension bridge is always an intermediate curve between a parabola and a catenary, but in practice the curve is generally nearer to a parabola due to the weight of the load (i.e. the road) being much larger than the cables themselves, and in calculations the second-degree polynomial formula of a parabola is used.
A simple example of such a problem is to find the curve of shortest length connecting two points. If there are no constraints, the solution is a straight line between the points. However, if the curve is constrained to lie on a surface in space, then the solution is less obvious, and possibly many solutions may exist.
Four of the methods for approximating the area under curves. Left and right methods make the approximation using the right and left endpoints of each subinterval, respectively. Upper and lower methods make the approximation using the largest and smallest endpoint values of each subinterval, respectively. The values of the sums converge as the ...
In addition to curves and surfaces, parametric equations can describe manifolds and algebraic varieties of higher dimension, with the number of parameters being equal to the dimension of the manifold or variety, and the number of equations being equal to the dimension of the space in which the manifold or variety is considered (for curves the ...