Wolfram Demonstrations Project

12,000+ Open Interactive Demonstrations
Powered by Notebook Technology »

Radius of Curvature of Catenary

Initializing live version
Download to Desktop

Requires a Wolfram Notebook System

Interact on desktop, mobile and cloud with the free Wolfram Player or other Wolfram Language products.

Consider the catenary (blue curve). Let be an arbitrary point on the catenary and let be the point where the normal to the catenary meets the axis. Then the radius of curvature of the catenary at is equal to the distance from to , that is, , where is the center of the osculating circle to the catenary at .

Contributed by: Izidor Hafner (December 2012)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA

Snapshots

Details

Reference

[1] V. P. Minorsky, Problems in Higher Mathematics, Moscow: Mir Publishers, 1975, p. 217.

Embed Code

Take advantage of the Wolfram Notebook Emebedder for the recommended user experience.

Related Demonstrations More by Author
Browse all topics
Feedback (field required)
Email (field required) Name
Occupation Organization
Note: Your message & contact information may be shared with the author of any specific Demonstration for which you give feedback.
Send