The geometry of whips (Q664369)

In this interesting paper, the author studies some geometric aspects of the space of arcs parameterized by unit speed in the \(L^2\) metric. The author's summary: ``Physically, this corresponds to the motion of a whip, and it also arises in studying shape recognition. The geodesic equation is the nonlinear, nonlocal wave equation \(\eta _{tt}=\partial _s(\sigma \eta _s)\), with \(|\eta _s|\equiv 1\) and \(\sigma \) given by \(\sigma _{ss}-|\eta _{ss}|^2\sigma =-|\eta _{st}|^2\), with boundary conditions \(\sigma (t,1)=\sigma (t,-1)=0\) and \(\eta (t,0)=0\). We prove that the space of arcs is a submanifold of the space of all curves, that the orthogonal projection exists but is not smooth, and as a consequence we get a Riemannian exponential map that is continuous and even differentiable but not \(C^1\). This is related to the fact that the curvature is positive but unbounded above, so that there are conjugate points at arbitrarily short times along any geodesic.'' It is appreciated the combination of mathematical methods from apparently different study areas.