Lévy C curve
fractal curve
In mathematics, the Lévy C curve is a self-similar fractal curve that was first described and whose differentiability properties were analysed by Ernesto Cesàro in 1906 and Georg Faber in 1910, but now bears the name of French mathematician Paul Lévy, who was the first to describe its self-similarity properties as well as to provide a geometrical construction showing it as a representative curve in the same class as the Koch curve. It is a special case of a period-doubling curve, a de Rham curve.
L-system construction
If using a Lindenmayer system then the construction of the C curve starts with a straight line. An isosceles triangle with angles of 45°, 90° and 45° is built using this line as its hypotenuse. The original line is then replaced by the other two sides of this triangle.
At the second stage, the two new lines each form the base for another right-angled isosceles triangle, and are replaced by the other two sides of their respective triangle. So, after two stages, the curve takes the appearance of three sides of a rectangle with the same length as the original line, but only half as wide.
At each subsequent stage, each straight line segment in the curve is replaced by the other two sides of a right-angled isosceles triangle built on it. After n stages the curve consists of 2n line segments, each of which is smaller than the original line by a factor of 2n/2.
This L-system can be described as follows:
where "F" means "draw forward", "+" means "turn clockwise 45°", and "−" means "turn anticlockwise 45°".
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This entry incorporates text from “Lévy C curve” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.