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The tangent plane to a surface at a given point p is defined in an analogous way to the tangent line in the case of curves. It is the best approximation of the surface by a plane at p , and can be obtained as the limiting position of the planes passing through 3 distinct points on the surface close to p as these points converge to p .
The tangent plane at a regular point is the affine plane in R 3 spanned by these vectors and passing through the point r(u, v) on the surface determined by the parameters. Any tangent vector can be uniquely decomposed into a linear combination of r u {\displaystyle \mathbf {r} _{u}} and r v . {\displaystyle \mathbf {r} _{v}.}
The tangent plane is an affine concept, because its definition is independent of the choice of a metric. In other words, any affine transformation maps the tangent plane to the surface at a point to the tangent plane to the image of the surface at the image of the point.
An encapsulation of surface curvature can be found in the shape operator, S, which is a self-adjoint linear operator from the tangent plane to itself (specifically, the differential of the Gauss map). For a surface with tangent vectors X and normal N, the shape operator can be expressed compactly in index summation notation as
The dimension of the tangent space at every point of a connected manifold is the same as that of the manifold itself. For example, if the given manifold is a -sphere, then one can picture the tangent space at a point as the plane that touches the sphere at that point and is perpendicular to the
In differential geometry, the first fundamental form is the inner product on the tangent space of a surface in three-dimensional Euclidean space which is induced canonically from the dot product of R 3. It permits the calculation of curvature and metric properties of a surface such as length and area in a manner consistent with the ambient space.
In mathematics, a tangent vector is a vector that is tangent to a curve or surface at a given point. Tangent vectors are described in the differential geometry of curves in the context of curves in R n. More generally, tangent vectors are elements of a tangent space of a differentiable manifold. Tangent vectors can also be described in terms of ...
In the three-dimensional case a surface normal, or simply normal, to a surface at a point P is a vector that is perpendicular to the tangent plane to that surface at P. The word "normal" is also used as an adjective: a line normal to a plane, the normal component of a force, the normal vector, etc. The concept of normality generalizes to ...