Let be the horizontal rotation matrix through angle . Define the screw motion
Its linear part is an orthogonal matrix with determinant one, and its remaining part is a translation. Thus it is a proper Euclidean motion of Euclidean three-space, with .
In horizontal-vector notation the given parametric surface satisfies . Therefore
The defining circle in each horizontal plane is entirely parametrized by , so covers . The displayed equality and prove . This one-parameter subgroup preserves the dot products and cross products defining , and the chosen unit normal. Consequently their coordinate coefficients, and the Gaussian curvature, depend only on .
Use the unit normal from part (c), and orient by increasing . Write for its unit tangent vector. The signed geodesic curvature convention used below is
where is arc length. The second equality follows by differentiating : the term parallel to disappears in the scalar triple product. It makes the correction for a parameter which is not arc-length parametrization explicit.
Put , , , and . The speed is the constant . At ,
so
Taking its dot product with yields . Therefore
The screw motion of part (b) makes this independent of . Thus is a geodesic precisely when is an integer multiple of . Reversing the direction of traversal or the unit normal changes the sign of signed geodesic curvature; its magnitude is the absolute value of the displayed expression. The signed convention is needed in part (e).
For , let and use the orientation of a surface determined by . Its positive boundary orientation follows the bottom side in increasing , the right side in increasing , the top side in decreasing , and the left side in decreasing . The Gauss-Bonnet theorem for this disc with four corners reads
where the are the signed exterior angles.
The bottom and top sides have cancelling geodesic curvature integrals: a screw motion takes one to the other with opposite boundary orientation. Explicitly, along increasing at fixed , the speed is one and the signed geodesic curvature is on both sides. The right and left sides contribute, respectively, the integral along and minus the integral along .
Although the coordinate sides are generally not perpendicular, the corner contributions still sum to . Indeed, let be the angle between and , so
Starting at the bottom-left corner, the exterior angles are , , and . Their sum is . Cancelling this from the Gauss-Bonnet theorem leaves
which is the identity in part (e). For a rectangle covering more than one turn, apply the same argument on the parameter rectangle with its induced Riemannian metric, or partition it into narrower rectangles and cancel the artificial internal boundary contributions. This gives the version counting multiplicity, as required by the correction in part (e).