On a Class of Surfaces

Extract

The surfaces here considered were first discussed by Monge as surfaces whose normals are tangents to given developables. Under the name general surfaces moulures, Darboux treats them as the surfaces traced out by a fixed curve on a plane which rolls on a developable. When the developable is a cylinder he gives the general coordinates in his Leçons sur la Theorie Generale des Surfaces (Volume I., page 105). This led me to take up the more general case, but I later found that Darboux had also considered this in an ingenious and elegant manner in his Leçons sur les Systèmes Orthogonaux et les Coordonnées Curvilignes (Tome 1, pages 26–34). Perhaps this quite difFerent discussion will present some interesting points in analysis.