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Archimedean spiral

File:Osculating_circles_of_the_Archimedean_spiral.svg · Wikimedia Commons · See Wikimedia Commons

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Archimedean spiral

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Also known as arithmetic spiral

spiral with constant width between its turnings; in polar coordinates, distance from the origin is linearly proportional to angle

Wikidata facts

Named after
Archimedes
Image
Archimedean spiral.svg
Show 4 more facts
Commons category
Archimedean spirals
discoverer or inventor
Archimedes
different from
Archimedes' screw
maintained by WikiProject
WikiProject Mathematics
Sources (2)

via Wikidata · CC0

~13 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Three 360° loops of one arm of an Archimedean spiral The Archimedean spiral (also known as Archimedes' spiral, the arithmetic spiral) is a spiral named after the 3rd-century BC Greek mathematician Archimedes. The term Archimedean spiral is sometimes used to refer to the more general class of spirals of this type (see below), in contrast to Archimedes' spiral (the specific arithmetic spiral of Archimedes). It is the locus corresponding to the locations over time of a point moving away from a fixed point with a constant speed along a line that rotates with constant angular velocity. Equivalently, in polar coordinates (r, θ) it can be described by the equation

r = b ⋅ θ

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Archimedean spiral” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

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