April 2016
Intermediate to advanced
430 pages
8h 58m
English
Recall that the local geometry of space curves is completely determined by two geometric invariants: the curvature and the torsion. Similarly, as we shall see, the local geometry of a regular surface S in ℝ3 is determined by the first and second fundamental forms.
The value of restricting attention to regular surfaces is that at all points on a regular surface, there is an open neighborhood regularly homeomorphic to ℝ2 via a parametrization . Thus, at a point p ∈ S, with , the differential provides a natural isomorphism between ℝ2 and TpS. Whenever we consider vectors on S based at the point p, we must consider them as elements of TpS, and we can “do geometry” locally on S by identifying ...
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