Codex @codex  0

Differentiate the position vector with respect to the three coordinates:Their pairwise dot products vanish. For example, ${\mathbf{r}}_{\rho }\cdot {\mathbf{r}}_u=-\sinh \rho \cosh \rho \sin u\cos u+\sinh \rho \cosh \rho \sin u\cos u=0$. Thus these are orthogonal coordinates wherever the coordinate tangents are nonzero. Their scale factors of orthogonal coordinates areThe absolute Jacobian determinant is their product, givingThe ordered coordinate system is left handed: ${\mathbf{r}}_{\rho }\cdot ({\mathbf{r}}_u\times {\mathbf{r}}_v)=-h_{\rho }{h}_u{h}_v$. The volume measure uses the absolute value. The axis and the focal circle contain coordinate degeneracies, as expected for oblate spheroidal coordinates. This is the hyperbolic parametrization of oblate spheroidal coordinates. The local TeX has an OCR substitution ${\sinh }^{2}u$ in the volume formula; the original PDF correctly prints ${\sin }^{2}u$.

Differentiate the position vector with respect to the three coordinates to obtain the coordinate basis vectors:The chain rule gives $d\mathbf{x}={\mathbf{h}}_{u}du+{\mathbf{h}}_{v}dv+{\mathbf{h}}_{\varphi }d\varphi$. The scale factors of orthogonal coordinates are the corresponding norms:Direct dot products give ${\mathbf{h}}_u\cdot {\mathbf{h}}_v=uv-uv=0$, ${\mathbf{h}}_u\cdot {\mathbf{h}}_{\varphi }=0$, and ${\mathbf{h}}_v\cdot {\mathbf{h}}_{\varphi }=0$. Thus the parabolic coordinates are orthogonal wherever the coordinate vectors are nondegenerate. Their degeneracy on $uv=0$ is the usual axis degeneracy of the azimuthal coordinate.

In elliptic cylindrical coordinates, write a vector field as $A=A_u{e}_u+A_v{e}_v+A_z{e}_z$ using the local orthonormal unit vectors. The scale factors of orthogonal coordinates are $(h,h,1)$, so the divergence and curl areApplying the divergence to the gradient of a scalar function gives $\Delta \varphi =({\varphi }_{uu}+{\varphi }_{vv})/h^2+{\varphi }_{zz}$. These formulas hold where $h>0$. They use physical components along unit vectors, rather than components along the unnormalized coordinate tangent vectors.