The solid angle is the intercepted surface area on a sphere of radius , divided by . Take the cone axis as the polar axis of spherical coordinates, and call its half-opening angle . With polar integration variable ,
For small measured in radians, the Taylor series of the cosine gives
This is the solid angle of a circular cone, measured in steradians.
The supplied angular diameter is twice the half-opening angle, so
Hence either apparent disc subtends
The fraction is about of the entire celestial sphere. Using the angular diameter directly in would give four times the correct small-angle answer.
A normal mode is a motion of a linear oscillatory system in which every coordinate has the same angular frequency and a fixed relative amplitude and phase. For a conservative small-displacement system it has the form
where is the mode shape, the stiffness matrix, and the mass matrix. Superposing normal modes gives the general small-oscillation motion when their eigenvectors form a complete basis.
Two common examples are standing transverse oscillations of a string fixed at both ends, and oscillations of coupled masses and springs. The string's mode shapes are sinusoidal along its length; the coupled system's mode shapes are fixed patterns of particle displacements. The following parts determine those patterns for the three-mass system in the source figure.
The successive derivatives are , so . Substitution in the Taylor series formula about gives
The ratio test shows convergence for every finite real or complex : the absolute ratio of successive terms is . This is also the usual exponential function series applied to , proving that the series equals the stated function everywhere.
Assume small planar oscillations about the vertical equilibrium, with the connecting spring relaxed in that equilibrium. Let be the first-order horizontal displacements of the two simple pendulums. The gravitational restoring force on bob is ; the spring extension to first order is . Thus the linearized equations of motion are
Adding and subtracting them diagonalizes the system. For and ,
The normal modes and angular frequencies are therefore
The in-phase mode does not stretch the spring, while the opposite-phase mode adds a restoring force of magnitude times each bob's displacement. These are the small-oscillation frequencies, not exact amplitude-independent frequencies for arbitrary pendulum angles.
For an oriented piecewise smooth surface , a continuously differentiable vector field on a neighborhood of it, and its compatibly oriented boundary , Stokes theorem states
Here is the chosen unit normal vector, is the unsigned surface area element, and is the tangent displacement along . The right-hand rule relates the boundary direction to .
The supplied field has curl . Parametrize the plane by over the triangle . Its upward oriented surface area element is , giving
For the boundary line integral, take the positively oriented vertices , , . Their projections run counterclockwise in the horizontal plane. With , the three edges are
On each edge, direct substitution gives . Hence
The two independent computations agree, including the orientation sign.
A conservative vector field can be written as for a single-valued scalar potential . Its line integral between two points depends only on the endpoints, and its integral around every closed curve is zero. A necessary local test for a smooth planar field is . On a simply connected domain such as the whole plane, this is also sufficient.
Here
An explicit scalar potential is even more decisive:
Indeed and . Thus the field is conservative on .
An exact differential is a differential one-form equal to on its domain; an inexact differential is not the differential of a single-valued potential there. For example, is exact. For the supplied form , the cross derivatives are
They disagree, so is not even closed and hence cannot be exact. Equivalently, its counterclockwise line integral around the unit square is . Therefore
The connection is : a vector field is conservative precisely when its work differential one-form is exact. Locally vanishing curl alone need not guarantee global exactness on a domain with holes.

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