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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 ...
The vectors T and N at two points on a plane curve, a translated version of the second frame (dotted), and δT the change in T. Here δs is the distance between the points. In the limit dT / ds will be in the direction N. The curvature describes the rate of rotation of the frame.
The reference point (analogous to the origin of a Cartesian coordinate system) is called the pole, and the ray from the pole in the reference direction is the polar axis. The distance from the pole is called the radial coordinate, radial distance or simply radius, and the angle is called the angular coordinate, polar angle, or azimuth. [1]
For example, a circle of radius 2, centered at the origin of the plane, may be described as the set of all points whose coordinates x and y satisfy the equation x 2 + y 2 = 4; the area, the perimeter and the tangent line at any point can be computed from this equation by using integrals and derivatives, in a way that can be applied to any curve.
Arc length is the distance between two points along a section of a curve. Determining the length of an irregular arc segment by approximating the arc segment as connected (straight) line segments is also called curve rectification. For a rectifiable curve these approximations don't get arbitrarily large (so the curve has a finite length).
A metric space defined over a set of points in terms of distances in a graph defined over the set is called a graph metric. The vertex set (of an undirected graph) and the distance function form a metric space, if and only if the graph is connected. The eccentricity ϵ(v) of a vertex v is the greatest distance between v and any other vertex; in ...
The haversine formula determines the great-circle distance between two points on a sphere given their longitudes and latitudes. Important in navigation , it is a special case of a more general formula in spherical trigonometry , the law of haversines , that relates the sides and angles of spherical triangles.
The sum of the squared lengths of any two chords intersecting at right angles at a given point is the same as that of any other two perpendicular chords intersecting at the same point and is given by 8r 2 − 4p 2, where r is the circle radius, and p is the distance from the centre point to the point of intersection.