In this section, we study formulas related to curves in both two and three dimensions, and see how they are related to various properties of the same curve. For example, suppose a vector-valued function describes the motion of a particle in space. We would like to determine how far the particle has traveled over a given time interval, which can be described by the arc length of the path it follows. Or, suppose that the vector-valued function describes a road we are building and we want to determine how sharply the road curves at a given point. This is described by the curvature of the function at that point. We explore each of these concepts in this section.
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- Calculus Volume 3. Authored by: Gilbert Strang, Edwin (Jed) Herman. Provided by: OpenStax. Located at: https://openstax.org/books/calculus-volume-3/pages/1-introduction. License: CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. License Terms: Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/calculus-volume-3/pages/1-introduction