Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 January 2009
The use of geodesic polar coordinates in the intrinsic geometry of a surface leads to the concept of a geodesic circle, i.e. the locus of points at a constant distance from the pole 0 along the geodesics through 0. A geodesic hypersphere is the obvious generalisation of this for a Riemannian Vn. We propose to consider more general central quadric hypersurfaces of Vn, which we define as follows. Let xi (i = 1, 2, …, n) be a system of coordinates in Vn, whose metric is gijdxidxj, and let aij be the components in the x's of a symmetric covariant tensor of the second order, evaluated at the point 0, which is taken as pole.
page 91 note 1 CfEisenhart, Riemannian Geometry, §§43, 44.Google Scholar