Talk:Arc length

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I think it should be redirected to curve

Tosha 01:25, 15 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I completely disagree with you, Tosha. I think this deserves a page on its own.

This means that in discussion of the geometry of the curves, any links to arc length now jump directly to the curves article. This is a disservice to readers navigating these articles who expect to go directly to a discussion of the concept of arc length, rather than to to the article on curves. -- Decumanus 19:39, 15 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I agree; this page can stand on its own. Michael Hardy 21:34, 15 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Ok, I think this way it is harder to keep it uptodate, but do as you wish.Tosha 23:56, 15 Mar 2004 (UTC)

This article is incomplete. It needs cleanup. I wikified the maths, but some of the formulas didn't seem to make sense the way they were written, so they should be checked.

The article is also in sore need of some images.

I reordered the article and fixed some of the math. It still needs more work though -Jacob 01:38, 14 June 2005 (UTC)

I've been fixated on the text bit - now that I look closely, that explanation of the Fermat math doesn't look right. It keeps sprouting unexplained new variables. Tearlach 19:37, 16 July 2005 (UTC)

I only fixed the LaTex formating of the math -not the content- now that I look criticaly, I see what you mean. It looks like the original author of the page just rewrote it from the pdf he cites. Reading the file explains what he was getting at. We I get some more time, I'll make a plot so one can follow along. We should add the final part too (from the pdf) where the formula shows that Fermat really did find the integral and his formula, he just didn't understand the implications. I'd like another source for verification that this is how it historicaly happened.

As far as I understand it, both van Heuraet and Fermat derived that if you have a function f(x), then the arc length is given by the area under a new function g(x) = sqrt(1 + f'(x)^2). So they had the function to be integrated, but not the integral calculus to apply to it. Tearlach 11:49, 17 July 2005 (UTC)

A bit added about the problems. As it stood, it was overoptimistic about the benefits of applying calculus. PS Semicubical parabola is y^3 = a*x^2. Tearlach 23:24, 15 July 2005 (UTC)

More bibliographic detail: Heuraet at MacTutor, Rida T Farouki reference here (PostScript) and here (text). Tearlach 07:26, 16 July 2005 (UTC)

And this Wallis biography from WW Rouse Ball describes van Heuraet's method for curve rectification. Tearlach 13:07, 16 July 2005 (UTC)

I added a graph for Fermat's method. I had different colors for the line originaly, but somehow, gnuplot stoped changing them as the code evolved. See Image:Arc length, Fermat.png for the code and please help me fix it. --Jacob 18:09, 22 July 2005 (UTC)

1 Article title
2 bi-secting cord
3 standard definition
4 Derivation

[edit] Article title

According to the article Arc, an arc is a continuous portion of a circle; part of a circle's circumference (also called a circle segment). The present article is about curves. It uses the undefined term "irregular arc", but in fact even in the present text the use of the term "curve" dominates the use of the term "arc". My conclusion is that the title ought to be: Length of a curve. Lambiam ^Talk 03:09, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

Actually, I prefer arc length, as that is what the concept is usually called in calculus books and more advanced books on differential geometry. The other names should just redirect to arc length. I also suspect that when writing an article, most mathematicians would use arc length, so this avoids unnecessary redirects.

There are terminology issues, as you've noticed. "Arc" actually is used to refer to more than what is currently in arc. In geometry/topology areas, it actually means a continuous map of the unit interval, and often in differential geometry, "arc" refers to "rectifiable arc". This usage of "arc" is actually fairly old, and that is the "arc" that is referred to by "arc length"; it may be tied to the historical "irregular arc" mentioned in the article. I think, though, that more people prefer "path" or "curve" over "arc" nowadays in topology.

In answer to your objection, while it may be strange that "curve" dominates "arc" in the article, it's just an artifact of history and usage that "arc length" has become the standard term rather than "curve length", although of course, people would probably understand what you mean by the latter in the appropriate context. --Chan-Ho (Talk) 03:58, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

I did a bit of research on other treatments. Mathworld, under "arc length", defines "Arc length is defined as the length along a curve"[1] and proceeds to give a treatment that will blow away all non-mathematicians; it appears to presuppose differentiability. PlanetMath, under "arc length", defines: "Arclength is the length of a section of a differentiable curve"[2] (italics added, L.), and the treatment given corresponds more or less to that of our Length of an arc. We also have Curve#Lengths_of_curves, which is somewhat unreadable and probably quite incomprehensible to the mathematically untrained, but in essence what I believe the Length article should cover: length as a kind of limit, with differentiable curves in Euclidean 2-space as a special case. Alternatively, we should make clear that this article covers only an important but nevertheless special case and insert a link to the more general, unfortunately unreadable, treatment. Lambiam ^Talk 06:19, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

I prefer arc length, I'd like to see this article moved to there. -lethe ^{talk +} 17:43, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

I also prefer arc length. The more general stuff at curve I think is also called arc length, but in the case of metric spaces, so it should be treated here. --MarSch 10:24, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

I have moved the article. This required deleting and merging old history, since there was once an article arc length, which has a history, and was improperly made into a redirect by Tosha in 2004, in violation of the GFDL. -lethe ^{talk +} 19:42, 11 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] bi-secting cord

Insert non-formatted text here

[edit] standard definition

The standard definition of arc length---the sup of polygonal path lengths---is not even mentioned here. I'll be back..... Michael Hardy 22:51, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

That definition applies to all curves in a metric space, not just rectifiable arc segments (differentiable curves?) in Euclidean space, in which case one might wonder why the article is not called "Curve length" or something like that. See also the above discussion on the article title. If someone feels like improving the present article, then note that it never defines what an "irregular arc segment" is, does not give any definition of arc length but only ways to determine it, and further confuses functions with their graphs plotted as curves in space. I also find the account under "Ancient" rather dubious and doubt that it is true as stated.

If general curves are treated, it would be reasonable to give fractal curves as an example of curves of infinite length; see also How Long Is the Coast of Britain? Statistical Self-Similarity and Fractional Dimension. --Lambiam ^Talk 23:25, 7 May 2006 (UTC)

"Rectifiable" does not imply "differentiable". I thought "rectifiable" meant the total length is finite, regardless of differentiability, or at least the length between any two points on the curve is finite (as with a line). Michael Hardy 03:13, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

The parenthetical question was a guess at a possibly intended meaning of "arc segment", given PlanetMath's definition of "arc length" as "the length of a section of a differentiable curve". --Lambiam ^Talk 08:44, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

In regard to curves that have infinite length between two points on the curve, one could see also space-filling curve. Michael Hardy 21:35, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

Indeed, a special but well-known case of fractals having Hausdorff dimension equal to 2.

Isn't there also a definition based on the limits of a cover of balls? --njh 11:51, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Both Hausdorff dimension and Minkowski-Bouligand dimension say something like: I am what you get as a limit of a cover of balls. Both are written in a way that makes it hard to see how this relates to the more formal definitions given. How they can be "informally" the same but actually different is not immediately clear to me. --Lambiam ^Talk 13:12, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

They talk about computing the dimension of a structure. I recall there being a way to define arc length itself as a covering. --njh 02:19, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Derivation

A representative linear element of the function $\begin{cases} y = t^5 \\ x = t^3 \end{cases}$

I would like to show the derivation of at least the fundamental parametric arc length formula, however since I'm new to this math format and it is a moderately long explination, I'm going to be working on it here and moving it into the article once it is complete and has been peer reviewed. Please let me know of any errors that you may see, I will move it into the main page in the near future. If anyone might be able to explain the conversion of this integral into the one used for ordinary functions (f(x)) it would be very useful.

In order to approximate the arc length of the curve, it is split into many linear segments. To make the value exact, and not an approximation, we will need infinitely many linear elements. This means that each element is infinately small. This fact manifests itself later on when we use an integral.

We start by looking at a representative linear segment (see image) and observe that its length (element of the arc length) will be the differential ds. We will call the horizontal element of this distance dx, and the vertical element dy.

Now, recall the distance formula which tells us that

$ds = \sqrt{dx^2 + dy^2}$ .