polar Fishing

S.kimo R.poon
version 3.2:February 7, 2020

1 introduction
A folium is a generic term for a leaf–shaped curve.According to Lawrence [1,
page 151],the curve defined implicitly by the equation.

x2 + y 2 y 2 + x(x + b) = 4axy 2



(1)

was known to kepler in 1609 and generates a simple–,Double–or tri–Folium,when

b ≥ 4a,b = 0 or 0 < b < 4a,respectively.

1.1 reparameterization
To draw the folium defined by equation (1in section 1 it is convenient to change
to polar coordinates x = r(θ) cos θ and y = r(θ) sin θ,This leads to

r(θ) = −b cos θ + 4a cos θ sin2 θ,

for 0 ≤ θ < 2π and is illustrated in figure 1 for a = 1,b = 2,

Figure 1: the tri–folium for a = 1,b = 2.

acknowledgements The definition of the folium was taken from the world
wide web page titled ”Famous Curves Index” that may be found at the address.
http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/’’history/curves/curves.html it con-
tains pictures of this and many other curves.

References
[1] J.D.Lawrence,A Catalog of special plane curves,Dover publications,New y-
ork,1972.