Total curvature of non-differentiable curves (Q582586): Difference between revisions

This paper deals with the total curvature of continuous curves in Euclidean (and metric) spaces. The total curvature is introduced as the supremum of the sums of angles of inscribed polygons. Under the assumption that the total curvature of the curve is finite the following properties are shown: Such a curve has one-sided tangents everywhere and is smooth at all but a countable number of points. It can be decomposed into finitely many graphs of Lipschitz functions, and the total curvature can be interpreted in a suitable way as the length of the generalized Gauss image. Also relations with rectifiability and bounded variation are investigated. It should be noted that much work in this direction already has been done by \textit{A. D. Alexandrov} and \textit{Yu. G. Reshetnyak}, General Theory of Irregular Curves (Dordrecht 1989; Zbl 0691.53002).