Curvatures, volumes and norms of derivatives for curves in Riemannian manifolds (Q720669)

Consider a differentiable curve \(c:I\subset {\mathbb R}\rightarrow {\mathbb R}^{n}\) with linearly independent derivatives \(c',c'',\dots,c^{(n-1)}\) at every point and denote \(\kappa_1,\dots,\kappa_{n-1}\) the curvature functions. Together with the length of the tangent vector \(c'\) these functions are well known to be a complete set of invariants. The main result of the present paper are the expressions of the curvature functions by volumes of sets of vectors \(c',c'',\dots,c^{(n-1)}\). More precisely, it is proved that the following holds: The curvature functions satisfy \[ \kappa_r={{\mathrm{vol}(c',c'',\dots,c^{(r-1)})\,\mathrm{vol}(c',c'',\dots,c^{(r+1)})}\over {\mathrm{vol}(c',c'',\dots,c^{(r)})^2}}\|c'\|^{-1}, (1\leq r\leq n-2) \] and \[ \kappa_{n-1}={{\mathrm{vol}(c',c'',\dots,c^{(n-2)})\,\det(c',c'',\dots,c^{(n)})}\over {\mathrm{vol}(c',c'',\dots,c^{(n-1)})^2}}\|c'\|^{-1}. \] As the author points out these results are not new, but derived in a more direct way as usual. Furthermore the results are extended to Riemannian manifolds replacing the differentiation in \({\mathbb R}^{n}\) by the Riemannian covariant differentiation.