The family of level sets of a harmonic function (Q1996451)

The main result, Theorem 1, characterizes families of level-sets of harmonic functions of two variables without critical points in terms of the curvature \(\kappa\) of a level set \(\gamma_t\). The proof relies on the basic fact (Lemma 3) that a \(C^2\) function \(f\) on a domain \(\Omega\subset \mathbb{R}^2\) without critical points is harmonic if and only if \(\kappa\equiv \frac{D_N^2 f}{D_Nf}\) on \(\Omega\), where \(N=\nabla f/|\nabla f|\) is the unit normal field, \(D_N f\), \(D_N^2 f\) are the first and second directional derivatives of \(f\) along \(N\). The author also extends Theorem 1 to higher dimensions for the case when the level sets are diffeomorphic to \(\mathbb{R}^{n-1}\) (Theorem 4).