Meaning of Gauss map | Babel Free

Definitions

A map from a given oriented surface in Euclidean space to the unit sphere which maps each point on the surface to a unit vector orthogonal to the surface at that point.

Examples

“1969 [Van Nostrand], Robert Osserman, A Survey of Minimal Surfaces, 2014, Dover, Unabridged republication, page 73, There exist complete generalized minimal surfaces, not lying in a plane, whose Gauss map lies in an arbitrarily small neighborhood on the sphere.”

“1985, R. G. Burns (translator), B. A. Dubrovin, A. T. Fomenko, S. P. Novikov, Modern Geometry― Methods and Applications: Part II: The Geometry and Topology of Manifolds, Springer, Graduate Texts in Mathematics, page 114, 14.2.2 Theorem The integral of the Gaussian curvature over a closed hypersurface in Euclidean n-space is equal to the degree of the Gauss map of the surface, multiplied by γₙ (the Euclidean volume of the unit (n-1)-sphere).”

“In §2 we use results of §1 for the study of Gauss maps of projective varieties. The classical Gauss map associates to each point of a nonsingular real affine hypersurface the unit vector of the external normal at this point.”

CEFR level