In mathematics, particularly in

differential geometry Differential geometry is a Mathematics, mathematical discipline that studies the geometry of smooth shapes and smooth spaces, otherwise known as smooth manifolds. It uses the techniques of Calculus, single variable calculus, vector calculus, lin ...

, a Zoll surface, named after Otto Zoll, is a

surface A surface, as the term is most generally used, is the outermost or uppermost layer of a physical object or space. It is the portion or region of the object that can first be perceived by an observer using the senses of sight and touch, and is ...

homeomorphic In mathematics and more specifically in topology, a homeomorphism ( from Greek roots meaning "similar shape", named by Henri Poincaré), also called topological isomorphism, or bicontinuous function, is a bijective and continuous function betw ...

to the

2-sphere A sphere (from Greek , ) is a surface analogous to the circle, a curve. In solid geometry, a sphere is the set of points that are all at the same distance from a given point in three-dimensional space.. That given point is the ''center' ...

, equipped with a

Riemannian metric In differential geometry, a Riemannian manifold is a geometric space on which many geometric notions such as distance, angles, length, volume, and curvature are defined. Euclidean space, the N-sphere, n-sphere, hyperbolic space, and smooth surf ...

all of whose

geodesic In geometry, a geodesic () is a curve representing in some sense the locally shortest path ( arc) between two points in a surface, or more generally in a Riemannian manifold. The term also has meaning in any differentiable manifold with a conn ...

s are closed and of equal length. While the usual unit-sphere metric on ''S''² obviously has this property, it also has an infinite-dimensional family of geometrically distinct deformations that are still Zoll surfaces. In particular, most Zoll surfaces do not have constant

curvature In mathematics, curvature is any of several strongly related concepts in geometry that intuitively measure the amount by which a curve deviates from being a straight line or by which a surface deviates from being a plane. If a curve or su ...

. Zoll, a student of

David Hilbert David Hilbert (; ; 23 January 1862 – 14 February 1943) was a German mathematician and philosopher of mathematics and one of the most influential mathematicians of his time. Hilbert discovered and developed a broad range of fundamental idea ...

, discovered the first non-trivial examples.

References

* * * * *

External links

Tannery's pear
an example of Zoll surface where all closed geodesics (up to the meridians) are shaped like a curved-figure eight. {{topology-stub Surfaces Eponyms in geometry

See also

References

External links