The Coffee Cup Caustic for Calculus Students

Brian J. Loe; Nathaniel Beagley

The College Mathematics Journal, Vol. 28, No. 4. (Sep., 1997), pp. 277-284.
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The Coffee Cup Caustic for Calculus
Students
Brian J. Loe and Nathaniel Beagley
Brian Loe (loe@securecomputing.com) is currently a senior
computer scientist in the Mathematical Methods group at
Secure Computing Corporation, where he applies formal
methods in an industrial setting by writing formal specifi-
cations and proofs of computer security properties. He
received a Ph.D, in partial differential equations in 1989
from Brown University and taught in the mathematics
departments at Iowa State University and Carleton College.
He enjoys playing contract bridge, running, and spending
summer weekends at the lake with his wife, Melissa, and
daughters Katie, Maren, and Caroline.
Nathaniel Beagley (nbeagley@carleton.edu) received his
B.A. from Carleton College and his M.S. from the University
of Colorado at Boulder. He is currently working in the high
tech industry in the Washington, DC, area. In his free time
he enjoys cooking elaborate meals and snowshoeing, and
he has already written the first few sentences of the next
great American novel.
The late Paul Erdos used to say that mathematicians are machines for turning coffee
into theorems. A coffee cup is indeed an excellent place to look for a theoreill or
two!
If you have never spent any time looking into your coffee cup, tiy it now. Does
the pattern cast in the bottoill of the mug resemble the cusped cuive in Figure l?
If not, here are soille suggestions for seeing this curve. First, choose a inug that is
essentially a right circular cylinder, with a smooth ceramic finish. (White mugs seem
to work best; a polished inetal bracelet or ring will also do the trick.) Next, place
the mug where sunlight can shine into it froin the side. A single incandescant bulb
Figure 1. The coffee cup caustic.
VOL. 28, NO. 4, SEPTEMBER 1997
is the next best light source, but fluorescent lights and multiple light sources do not
work well. Alternatively, you could hold a flashlight near the mug's rim, pointing
slightly downward. Finally, if your mug still has coffee or tea in it, add milk-the
light needs a reflective screen to become visible.
The bright pattern in your cup is an exalnple of a caustic curue. The term cazrstic
refers to the enveloping cuive or surface of reflected or refracted rays. Since we live
in a three-dimensional world, the caustic formed by light reflecting from the inner
wall of a coffee mug is actually a surface whose intersection with the bottoln of
the mug (or surface of the coffee) forins the cui-ve in Figure 1. Similarly, the bright
patterns cast on the bottom of a swimming pool are caustics formed by light rays
that are refracted as they enter the water at various angles of incidence due to the
waves on the surface.
The Greeli root of the word cazbstic means "to burn." So why are these curves
"caustic"? A caustic is formed by focusing light rays. It is this increased energy in-
tensity, especially in the fornl of heat, that gives the caustic its name. For example,
a magnifying glass can focus sunlight intensely enough to ignite a scrap of paper.
Archimedes in his defense of Syracuse supposedly used mirrors to focus sunlight on
the Roman fleet, burning the attacking ships in the harbor. Although this story, which
engages the imagination while vividly illustrating the concept of a caustic, was long
deemed apocryphal [51, in 1973 the Greek physicist Ionas Sakkos recreated the feat
[61. In his experiment 70 soldiers each held a polished copper sheet and reflected
sunlight at one spot on a replica of a Roman ship 200 meters away. Within seconds
it was ablaze!
Meanwhile, back at your coffee cup, what is that caustic curve? Oddly enough,
under the assumption that the incoming rays of light are parallel, the caustic is a
well-known culve: an epicycloid! Confirming this fact-which we first encountered
in [I],where it is presented without proof-is an interesting exercise for calculus
students at several levels.
We will first identify the coffee cup caustic by applying an elementary method
for finding the enveloping curve for a family of lines. The solution, which is geo-
metrically intuitive, is accessible to any first-semester calculus student who knows
1'HBpital's rule. The same geo~netric reasoning leads to a general method for find-
ing the envelope of a family of curves, but this is generally reserved for advanced
calculus texts (e.g. [41)and requires partial derivatives.
Our second method applies the focusing property of the parabola. A parabola
reflects light that is parallel to its axis of symmetry to a single point, called the~focus-
a fact taught in analytic geometry. Consider a parabola whose axis of syrilmetly is
parallel to the incoming light rays and that best fits the circular cross section of the
coffee cup. Where is its focus? Speaking loosely, the focus is at the point where
the reflected rays have their highest "density." In fact, the focus of this osculating
pa~abolais on the caustic! This second method may shed more light on the nature of
caustics (pun intended). The osculating parabola is a Taylor polynomial, something
studied in a second semester of calculus.
Moreover, this second method is an example of a more general theorem: The
caustic cuwe formed by pa?*allel incomilzg light rays and ~efiecting off a smooth,
curved suf ace is also the locus o f the foci of the osculating parabolas whose axes of
symwzetq) are parallel to the incorning light. We prove this more general result using
techniques froill a third-semester course in calculus
THE COLLEGE MATHEMATICS JOURNAL 278
Enveloping Curves
Although the caustic is a three-dimensional phenomenon, we may reduce the prob-
lem to two dimensions. Assume that the incoming light rays are parallel, that the cup
is a right circular cylinder whose axis of sy~umetry is vertical, and that each incoming
light ray has some downward component so that the reflected light shines on the
bottom of the cup. A light ray reflects off the inside wall of the cup and then strikes
the bottom of the cup at a point. (At each reflection only a fraction of the light is
reflected; the remaining part is scattered, which is what makes the caustic visible
to us. We can ignore secondary reflections, because the scattering at each reflection
reduces the intensity of the reflected light by some factor.)
Choose any light ray that strikes the side of the cup and whose reflected ray strikes
the bottom. Choose a second ray directly above it. The second ray then strikes the
side of the cup a little higher. Since the reflective surface is a right circular cylinder,
the two reflected rays are also parallel, with the second ray directly above the first,
and the second reflected ray strikes the bottom of the cup a little farther from the
side of the cup. In fact an entire family of incoming light rays fills out a vertical plane,
so that the points along the bottom of the cup where the reflected light strikes form
a line segment. Thus, we can reduce the analysis of the incoming and reflected rays
to a two-dimensional problem by examining their projection into a horizontal plane.
Assume that the incoming rays are parallel to the x-axis and travel from left to
right, as in Figure 1.Assume also that the reflecting surface of the coffee cup lies on
the unit circle centered at the origin. Parametrize the inside wall of the coffee cup
by (cos0, sinO), where -T < Q 5 T ,
We can attach the parameter 0 to the reflected light ray that is reflected at each
point as 0 varies over the interval ( - ~ / 2 , ~ 1 2 ) . Let Lo denote the line along which
the reflected ray travels. By definition the enveloping curve is tangent to Lo; but at
which point along Lo does the enveloping curve touch?
To find the point of tangency, consider a smooth curve and its collection of tangent
lines. Draw tangent lines at points P, Q, and Q', respectively denoted as Lp,LQ,
and LQ/, where Q' is between P and Q; see Figure 2. Note that, as long as the curve
has no inflection points between P and Q, the intersection of Lpand LQ,is closer
to P than is the intersection of Lp and LQ.Symbolically,
lim (LQnLp)= P.
Q+P
Figure 2. Intersecting tangents.
VOL. 28, NO. 4, SEPTEMBER 1997
Figure 3. A reflected ray.
We must find the intersection of Lo and a nearby reflected ray lying on the line
L4. Figure 3 shows an incoming ray reflecting off the cup at the point parametrized
by (cos 0, sin 8). The normal line at the point (cos Q, sin 0) passes through the origin,
and the incoming ray is parallel to the x-axis; so the angle of incidence (the angle
between the incoming ray and the normal line) is Q. The angle of reflection must
equal the angle of incidence; so the angle between the reflected ray and the incoming
ray must be 28. Hence, the angle between the reflected ray and the x-axis is also 20.
The point-slope formula for Ls is therefore given by the equation
y -sin Q = t an 2Q(x -cos Q)
However, this formula makes sense only when the slope is defined, Q # h / 4 .
When Q = &7r/4, the line Ls is the vertical line with equation x = cosQ (= 4 1 2 ) .
Multiplying through by cos 20 when Q # 7r/4, we obtain a formula that makes sense
for all values of 0:
x sin 28 -y cos 20 = sin 0.
Let X( Q, +) denote the x-coordinate of the intersection of Lo and Lq. By Cramer's
rule,
1 sin Q -cos 20 1
1 sin 4
1 -cos 2 4
X(Q'
= I sin 28 -cos 28 1
I sin 2 4 -cos 2 4 1
sin 4 cos 28 - sin Q cos 2 d
-
-
sin 2 4 cos 20 -sin 20 cos 2 4 '
Writing the solution in this form makes it clear that when 4 = Q the quotient is
undefined because the lines coincide.
A quick application of 1'HBpital's rule yields
x(Q) = lim X ( Q, 4)
= -
1
[cosQ cos 20 +2 sin Q sin 201
2
THE COLLEGE MATHEMATICS JOURNAL
Backsubstituting in the equation for Lo, we obtain
Thus ( x ( Q) , y( 0) ) is the standard parametrization of the epicycloid formed by rolling
a circle of radius 114 around a circle of radius 112 whose center is at the origin as
in Figure 4.
Exercise. The following problem appears in many calculus texts:
The astroid satisfies the equation x2/ 3 +y2/ 3= a2I3. Show that the x- and y-intercepts
of a line that is tangent to the astroid in the first quadrant are a units apart.
With the tools presented above, consider the inverse problem:
Consider the family of line segments in the first quadrant that have one endpoint on the
x-axis and the other on the y-axis and are all a units long. Show that the envelope of
this family of line segments is the astroid.
[Hint: The endpoints can be parametrized by ( acos 0, O) and ( 0, a sin 0 ).I
Osculating Parabolas
If the reflective surface were not a circular cup but a parabolic mirror with its axis
of symmetry parallel to the incoming light, then all of the reflected light rays would
intersect at the focus of the parabola. This property is unique to the parabola. As we
suggested earlier, the focus of the parabola that best fits the circle of our coffee cup
at a point will fall on the caustic associated with the circle. We call this best-fitting
parabola the osculatingparabola.
But at any given point along a smooth curve there is an entire family of parabolas
that match the curve up to its second derivative; so what do we mean by the oscu-
lating parabola? Since the incoming rays are parallel, we select the uniquepavabola
whose axis is parallel to the incoming 1"ays and that agrees with the circle up to the
second derivative. This makes sense because the reflected ray depends on the direc-
tion of the tangent line (first derivative information), whereas the caustic depends
on the crossings of reflected rays which in turn depend on how fast the direction of
the reflected rays changes (second derivative information).
VOL. 28, NO. 4, SEPTEMBER 1997
Let's rotate our picture clockwise by 90 degrees. Now the incoming rays are parallel
to the y-axis traveling from top to bottom, and the reflecting edge of the coffee cup
is given by the graph of the equation y = - d m , where -1 < x < 1.
Let f ( x ) = - d m . Then the parabola that opens upward and best fits the
curve at the point xo is the Taylor polynon~ial of degree two:
The focus of a parabola of the form y = ax2 + bx + c is located at the point
(-b/ 2a, (4ac - b2 + 1) / 4a) . Therefore the focus for a parabola that is of the form
y = a ( x - xo) 2+ b( x x o) + c will be translated horizontally by xo, to the point -
( x o- b/2a, (4ac - b2 + 1) / 4a) .Using this fact together with the formula for P2,we
find that the focus of the osculating parabola is at the point
It is not imtuediately clear that this defines an epicycloid, but if we make the
substitution xo = cos 8, which is a natural substitution since the circle is parametrized
by (cos 8, sin 8) , then
This is indeed the same result as before, but rotated through 90 degrees.
The Caustic as the Singular Locus of a Planar Mapping
That the locus of the foci of the osculating parabolas is the caustic formed by the
coffee cup and incoming parallel rays is not merely a coincidence. We can state a
theorem for more general curves than circles.
Let x : R + R2 be the vector-valued function that parametrizes a curve. We'll
assume that x is smooth (the second derivative is continuous). Let's also assume that
the incoming light rays are parallel to a fixed vector v.What is the direction of the
light ray that reflects at the point x(Q)?
The tangent vector at x ( 8 ) is x l ( 0) ;so we resolve v into its tangential and normal
components, respectively,
where (., .) is the usual inner product. As we see in Figure 5, the reflected ray has
the same tangential component but a reversed normal component. Denoting the
direction of the reflected ray by R v ,we can write the equation
THE COLLEGE MATHEMATICS JOURNAL
Figure 5. The reflected ray at x(8)
The reflected ray has the direction of Rv and passes through the point x(8);so
we parametrize this line as
What we have now is a mapping g : ( 8 ,t ) H x(8)+ tRv, from IW2 into TR2. The
envelope of the reflected rays is the image of the points at which the mapping is
singular.
The traditional interpretation of the Jacobian determinant lends itself nicely to
understanding the caustic from a physical point of view as the image of the set
of points where the mapping g ( 8 , t ) is singular. Consider a small section of the
reflecting curve from ~ ( 8 , )to x(Qo+ A8) and the photons incident upon it within
a t interval of length At units, beginning at time t o.(If we identify the parameter t
with time, the number of such incident photons is proportional to At, because light
moves at constant velocity.) These photons occupy a region with area approximately
proportional to J, ( Qo,to)A8At, where J, is the Jacobian determinant of g; see Figure
6. Although this approximation is meaningless at points where the Jacobian is equal
to zero, it shows that one may interpret the reciprocal of the Jacobian as a measure
of photon density. Thus the photon density increases as one approaches the curve
along which the Jacobian determinant is zero-that is, the caustic.
To prove that this new definition of caustics is equivalent to the definition in terms
of the osculating parabolas we may, without loss of generality, consider the case in
which the incoming light is coming straight down, v = (0, I ) , and the curve is the
Figure 6. The interpretation of the Jacobian at (80,to).
VOL. 28, NO. 4, SEPTEMBER 1997
graphof afunction,x(0)=(0, f (0)). Let g :lR2 +lR2 be defined,asabove,by
g(0, t) =x(0)+tRv =(8,f (Q))+t
(1, f'(0)) +(0,1)}
Thereaderinay checkthattheJacobian determinant forg is singular when
andthat whenwesubstitute thisback intog(Q, t) weget
It is also easy to check that this point is the focus of the parabola given by the
second-degree Taylor polynoi~lial of f. Froin this we nlay conclude the general
theorem: Tbe cazlstic~for??zed by the reflection ofparallel light rays fl-om a smooth
curve is the loczls of the foci of the osculatingpnrabolas.
Theinterestedreadercanfindmoregeneraltreatlnentsof causticsof planecurves
in [21 and [3].
References
1. C.13. Boyer, The Rc~iizbolu: From ~Mj)th to:Mc~thematics, PrincetonUniversity Press,Princeton,NJ, 1987.
2. J.\V. Bruceancl P.J.Giblin, C~lruesand Siizg~~lar-ities, CanlbridgeUniversity Press,2nded. , 1992.
3.J. W. Bruce, P. J. Giblin, and C. G. Gibson, On caustics of plane culves,Atnerican Mntl3ernaticnl
lMoizth!y 88(1981) 651-667.
4. R.CourantandF.John, Introdz~ction to Calcr~lz~s a?zclAiza(ysis,vol.2, Springer-Verlag. NewYork. 1989.
5. E.J.Dijksterhuis.Archinzedes, HumanitiesPress. NewYork, 1957.
6. S. Semenchinsky, Focusing on the fleet: Archimeclean smoke ancl mirrors. Qunntzlm (Septernhed
October 1993)28-30.
1
I
Open-Ended Questions
I fellinlovewithnumbertheoryinCarmichael'scourse.Hemade11s prepare
a tablewhoserow headingswerethefirst400positive integers,andwhose
column headings,at ~out 25of them,were items like factorization,sumsof
squares,sumsof primes.Ourinstructionsweretofi l l inthetable,andthen
proceed toguess(andi f possible prove)asmany theoremsaswecould.
Paul R. Ilalmos,IMint to Be a ,Vuthe?tluticiun,
MAA Spectn~m, 1985,page42
THECOLLEGEMATHEMATICSJOURNAL 284