Plane curves in Lie sphere geometry (Q2365349): Difference between revisions

Following \textit{T. E. Cecil}'s book [Lie sphere geometry (Springer, New York) (1992; Zbl 0752.53003)], the authors give a sketchy introduction to Lie sphere geometry. In Lie sphere geometry, points -- ``point spheres'' -- do not play a distinguished role: while a Lie sphere transformation preserves the space of hyperspheres (including point spheres) in \(S^n\), the set of points is not preserved -- a point may be mapped to a sphere (with nonzero radius) and a sphere may be mapped to a point. For this reason, the notion of (hyper-)surfaces and curves has to be elaborated more carefully: an oriented hypersurface in \(S^n\) is described by the corresponding ``Legendre map'' which assigns to a point of the hypersurface the 1-parameter family of spheres that have oriented first order contact with the hypersurface at that point. Thus, a Legendre map can be thought of as a line congruence in the space \(Q^{n+1} \subset \mathbb{R} P^{n+2}\) of hyperspheres in \(S^n\). The differential geometry of a hypersurface in Lie sphere geometry is then described in terms of a ``Lie framing'' \(Y: M^{n-1} \to O_2 (n+3)\) assigning to a point a (suitable normalized) basis in the space \(\mathbb{R}_2^{n+3}\) of homogeneous coordinates of \(\mathbb{R} P^{n+2}\). Using this setup, the authors ``\dots construct Lie frames of Legendre maps into the unit tangent bundle of \(S^2\) according to the method of moving frames, and classify them''.