February 2006
Intermediate to advanced
600 pages
8h 57m
English
Classical 3D differential geometry deals with the properties of surfaces as well as curves. The various tools used to analyze curves become more complex when we turn to surfaces. The role of the tangent is taken by the surface normal, and the entire treatment becomes more involved. From our point of view, we will focus from the outset not only on the surface normal but on the entire frame at each point, leading ultimately to an alternative quaternion treatment for the entire subject of surface geometry.
This section contains a brief outline of the features of classical differential geometry of surfaces that we will require to proceed to our quaternion treatment. For more details, we refer the reader ...