Constructing isothermal curvature line coordinates on surfaces which admit them (Q2440514)

An immersion is said to be conformal, or isothermal, if its first fundamental form is proportional to the first fundamental form of a plane. A surface is said to be parameterized in curvature line coordinates, if both the first and second fundamental forms are diagonal. A surface in \(\mathbb R^3\) is said to be parameterized in isothermic coordinates if the given parameterization is conformal and in curvature lines at the same time. The authors pose a problem: Starting from an arbitrary given immersion of an isothermic surface in the Euclidean 3-space, is there a simple method for obtaining an isothermic parameterization corresponding to it? A key idea is to apply the Gram-Schmidt ortogonalization and to multiply the velocity vectors (tangent frame) by a scaling function. The authors find a system of PDEs for the corresponding scaling function. The primary application consists of numerical algorithms for surface visualization. The algorithm is applied to unduloids.