\(C^{1}\) Hermite interpolation by Pythagorean hodograph quintics in Minkowski space (Q1016129)

The powerful machinery of Clifford algebra is applied to the problem of constructing Minkowski Pythagorean hodograph (MPH) plane curves of degree \(5\) with given endpoints and first derivatives vectors at the endpoints. For example, Lorentz transformations are used to parameterize all possible interpolants and to reduce the input data into a standard position. It is shown that if the input data for the \(C^1\)-Hermite interpolation problem are computed from a sufficiently smooth, and sufficiently small, space-like curve, then among all possible interpolants there is just one solution having approximation order \(4\) whereas all other solutions have only approximation order \(1\). This gives a general method for approximating any spake-like \(C^\infty\) curve by a \(C^1\) MPH quintic spline.