Curvature - Curvature of Plane Curves

Curvature of Plane Curves

Cauchy defined the centre of curvature C as the intersection point of two infinitely close normals to the curve, the radius of curvature as the distance from the point to C, and the curvature itself as the inverse of the radius of curvature.

Let C be a plane curve (the precise technical assumptions are given below). The curvature of C at a point is a measure of how sensitive its tangent line is to moving the point to other nearby points. There are a number of equivalent ways that this idea can be made precise.

One way is geometrical. It is natural to define the curvature of a straight line to be identically zero. The curvature of a circle of radius R should be large if R is small and small if R is large. Thus the curvature of a circle is defined to be the reciprocal of the radius:

Given any curve C and a point P on it, there is a unique circle or line which most closely approximates the curve near P, the osculating circle at P. The curvature of C at P is then defined to be the curvature of that circle or line. The radius of curvature is defined as the reciprocal of the curvature.

Another way to understand the curvature is physical. Suppose that a particle moves along the curve with unit speed. Taking the time s as the parameter for C, this provides a natural parametrization for the curve. The unit tangent vector T (which is also the velocity vector, since the particle is moving with unit speed) also depends on time. The curvature is then the magnitude of the rate of change of T. Symbolically,

This is the magnitude of the acceleration of the particle and the vector is the acceleration vector. Geometrically, the curvature measures how fast the unit tangent vector to the curve rotates. If a curve keeps close to the same direction, the unit tangent vector changes very little and the curvature is small; where the curve undergoes a tight turn, the curvature is large.

These two approaches to the curvature are related geometrically by the following observation. In the first definition, the curvature of a circle is equal to the ratio of the angle of an arc to its length. Likewise, the curvature of a plane curve at any point is the limiting ratio of dθ, an infinitesimal angle (in radians) between tangents to that curve at the ends of an infinitesimal segment of the curve, to the length of that segment ds, i.e., dθ/ds. If the tangents at the ends of the segment are represented by unit vectors, it is easy to show that in this limit, the magnitude of the difference vector is equal to dθ, which leads to the given expression in the second definition of curvature.