Geodesic curvature

In Riemannian geometry, the geodesic curvature of a curve measures how far the curve is from being a geodesic. For example, for 1D curves on a 2D surface embedded in 3D space, it is the curvature of the curve projected onto the surface's tangent plane. More generally, in a given manifold , the geodesic curvature is just the usual curvature of . However, when the curve is restricted to lie on a submanifold of , geodesic curvature refers to the curvature of in Failed to parse : {\displaystyle M} and it is different in general from the curvature of in the ambient manifold . The (ambient) curvature of depends on two factors: the curvature of the submanifold in the direction of , which depends only on the direction of the curve, and the curvature of seen in , which is a second order quantity. The relation between these is . In particular geodesics on have zero geodesic curvature, so that , which explains why they appear to be curved in ambient space whenever the submanifold is.

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