Potential Functions of Two Active Variables
Umbilic catastrophes are examples of corank 2 catastrophes. They can be observed in optics in the focal surfaces created by light reflecting off a surface in three dimensions and are intimately connected with the geometry of nearly spherical surfaces. Thom proposed that the Hyperbolic umbilic catastrophe modeled the breaking of a wave and the elliptical umbilic modeled the creation of hair like structures.
Read more about this topic: Catastrophe Theory
Famous quotes containing the words potential, functions, active and/or variables:
“Democracy is timelessly human, and timelessness always implies a certain amount of potential youthfulness.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“Why indeed must “God” be a noun? Why not a verb—the most active and dynamic of all.”
—Mary Daly (b. 1928)
“The variables are surprisingly few.... One can whip or be whipped; one can eat excrement or quaff urine; mouth and private part can be meet in this or that commerce. After which there is the gray of morning and the sour knowledge that things have remained fairly generally the same since man first met goat and woman.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)