Dec. 15, 2021
In mathematical analysis, a space-filling curve is a curve whose range contains the entire 2-dimensional unit square (or more generally an n-dimensional unit hypercube). Because Giuseppe Peano (1858–1932) was the first to discover one, space-filling curves in the 2-dimensional plane are sometimes called Peano curves, but that phrase also refers to the Peano curve, the specific example of a space-filling curve found by Peano.
Definition[edit]
Intuitively, a curve in two or three (or higher) dimensions can be thought of as the path of a continuously moving point. To eliminate the inherent vagueness of this notion, Jordan in 1887 introduced the following rigorous definition, which has since been adopted as the precise description of the notion of a curve:
In the most general form, the range of such a function may lie in an arbitrary topological space, but in the most commonly studied cases, the range will lie in a Euclidean space such as the 2-dimensional plane (a planar curve) or the 3-dimensional space (space curve).
Sometimes, the curve is identified with the image of the function (the set of all possible values of the function), instead of the function itself. It is also possible to define curves without endpoints to be a continuous function on the real line (or on the open unit interval (0, 1)).
History[edit]
In 1890, Peano discovered a continuous curve, now called the Peano curve, that passes through every point of the unit square (Peano (1890)). His purpose was to construct a continuous mapping from the unit interval onto the unit square. Peano was motivated by Georg Cantor's earlier counterintuitive result that the infinite number of points in a unit interval is the same cardinality as the infinite number of points in any finite-dimensional manifold, such as the unit square. The problem Peano solved was whether such a mapping could be continuous; i.e., a curve that fills a space. Peano's solution does not set up a continuous one-to-one correspondence between the unit interval and the unit square, and indeed such a correspondence does not exist (see "Properties" below).
It was common to associate the vague notions of thinness and 1-dimensionality to curves; all normally encountered curves were piecewise differentiable (that is, have piecewise continuous derivatives), and such curves cannot fill up the entire unit square. Therefore, Peano's space-filling curve was found to be highly counterintuitive.
From Peano's example, it was easy to deduce continuous curves whose ranges contained the n-dimensional hypercube (for any positive integer n). It was also easy to extend Peano's example to continuous curves without endpoints, which filled the entire n-dimensional Euclidean space (where n is 2, 3, or any other positive integer).
Most well-known space-filling curves are constructed iteratively as the limit of a sequence of piecewise linear continuous curves, each one more closely approximating the space-filling limit.
Peano's ground-breaking article contained no illustrations of his construction, which is defined in terms of ternary expansions and a mirroring operator. But the graphical construction was perfectly clear to him—he made an ornamental tiling showing a picture of the curve in his home in Turin. Peano's article also ends by observing that the technique can be obviously extended to other odd bases besides base 3. His choice to avoid any appeal to graphical visualization was motivated by a desire for a completely rigorous proof owing nothing to pictures. At that time (the beginning of the foundation of general topology), graphical arguments were still included in proofs, yet were becoming a hindrance to understanding often counterintuitive results.
A year later, David Hilbert published in the same journal a variation of Peano's construction (Hilbert 1891). Hilbert's article was the first to include a picture helping to visualize the construction technique, essentially the same as illustrated here. The analytic form of the Hilbert curve, however, is more complicated than Peano's.
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