
AnEuler spiral is a curve whosecurvature changes linearly with its curve length (the curvature of a circular curve is equal to the reciprocal of the radius). This curve is also referred to as aclothoid orCornu spiral.[1][2] The behavior ofFresnel integrals can be illustrated by an Euler spiral, a connection first made byMarie Alfred Cornu in 1874.[3]
The Euler spiral has applications todiffraction computations. They are also widely used inrailway andhighway engineering to designtransition curves between straight and curved sections of railways or roads. A similar application is also found inphotonic integrated circuits. The principle of linear variation of the curvature of the transition curve between a tangent and a circular curve defines the geometry of the Euler spiral:
The spiral has multiple names reflecting its discovery and application in multiple fields. The three major arenas were elastic springs ("Euler spiral", 1744), graphical computations in light diffraction ("Cornu spiral", 1874), and railway transitions ("the railway transition spiral", 1890).[2]
Leonhard Euler's work on the spiral came afterJames Bernoulli posed a problem in the theory of elasticity: what shape must a pre-curved wire spring be in such that, when flattened by pressing on the free end, it becomes a straight line? Euler established the properties of the spiral in 1744, noting at that time that the curve must have two limits, points that the curve wraps around and around but never reaches. Thirty-eight years later, in 1781, he reported his discovery of the formula for the limit (by "happy chance").[2]
Augustin Fresnel, working in 1818 on thediffraction of light, developed theFresnel integral that defines the same spiral. He was unaware of Euler's integrals or the connection to the theory of elasticity. In 1874,Alfred Marie Cornu showed that diffraction intensity could be read off a graph of the spiral by squaring the distance between two points on the graph. In his biographical sketch of Cornu,Henri Poincaré praised the advantages of the "spiral of Cornu" over the "unpleasant multitude of hairy integral formulas".Ernesto Cesàro chose to name the same curve "clothoid" afterClotho, one of the threeFates who spin the thread of life inGreek mythology.[2]
The third independent discovery occurred in the 1800s when various railway engineers sought a formula for gradual curvature in track shape. By 1880Arthur Newell Talbot worked out the integral formulas and their solution, which he called the "railway transition spiral". The connection to Euler's work was not made until 1922.[2]
Unaware of the solution of the geometry by Euler,William Rankine cited thecubic curve (a polynomial curve of degree 3), which is an approximation of the Euler spiral for small angular changes in the same way that aparabola is an approximation to a circular curve.[citation needed]
| R | Radius of curvature |
| Rc | Radius of circular curve at the end of the spiral |
| θ | Angle of curve from beginning of spiral (infiniteR) to a particular point on the spiral. This can also be measured as the angle between the initial tangent and the tangent at the concerned point. |
| θs | Angle of full spiral curve |
| L,s | Length measured along the spiral curve from its initial position |
| Ls,so | Length of spiral curve |

The graph on the right illustrates an Euler spiral used as an easement (transition) curve between two given curves, in this case a straight line (the negativex axis) and a circle. The spiral starts at the origin in the positivex direction and gradually turns anticlockwise toosculate the circle.
The spiral is a small segment of the above double-end Euler spiral in the first quadrant.
From the definition of the curvature, i.e.,We write in the format, where orthusNowIfThenThus
Ifa = 1, which is the case for normalized Euler curve, then the Cartesian coordinates are given by Fresnel integrals (or Euler integrals):
Euler's spiral is a type ofsuperspiral that has the property of a monotonic curvature function.[4]

To travel along a circular path, an object needs to be subject to acentripetal acceleration (for example: the Moon circles around the Earth because of gravity; a car turns its front wheels inward to generate a centripetal force). If a vehicle traveling on a straight path were to suddenly transition to a tangential circular path, it would require centripetal acceleration suddenly switching at the tangent point from zero to the required value; this would be difficult to achieve (think of a driver instantly moving the steering wheel from straight line to turning position, and the car actually doing it), putting mechanical stress on the vehicle's parts, and causing much discomfort (due to lateraljerk).
On early railroads this instant application of lateral force was not an issue since low speeds and wide-radius curves were employed (lateral forces on the passengers and the lateral sway was small and tolerable). As speeds of rail vehicles increased over the years, it became obvious that an easement is necessary, so that the centripetal acceleration increases smoothly with the traveled distance. Given the expression of centripetal accelerationv2/r, the obvious solution is to provide an easement curve whose curvature,1/R, increases linearly with the traveled distance.
Inoptics, the term Cornu spiral is used.[5]: 432 The Cornu spiral can be used to describe adiffraction pattern.[6]Consider a plane wave with phasor amplitudeE0e−jkz which is diffracted by a "knife edge" of heighth abovex = 0 on thez = 0 plane. Then the diffracted wave field can be expressed aswhere is theFresnel integral function on the complex plane.[citation needed]
So, to simplify the calculation of plane wave attenuation as it is diffracted from the knife-edge, one can use the diagram of a Cornu spiral by representing the quantitiesFr(a) − Fr(b) as the physical distances between the points represented byFr(a) andFr(b) for appropriatea andb. This facilitates a rough computation of the attenuation of the plane wave by the knife edge of heighth at a location(x,z) beyond the knife edge.
Bends with continuously varying radius of curvature following the Euler spiral are also used to reduce losses inphotonic integrated circuits, either in singlemodewaveguides,[7][8] to smoothen the abrupt change of curvature and suppress coupling to radiation modes, or in multimode waveguides,[9] in order to suppress coupling to higher order modes and ensure effective singlemode operation.A pioneering and very elegant application of the Euler spiral to waveguides had been made as early as 1957,[10] with a hollow metalwaveguide for microwaves. There the idea was to exploit the fact that a straight metal waveguide can be physically bent to naturally take a gradual bend shape resembling an Euler spiral.
In thepath integral formulation of quantum mechanics, the probability amplitude for propagation between two points can be visualized by connectingaction phase arrows for each time step between the two points. The arrows spiral around each endpoint forming what is termed a Cornu spiral.[11]
Motorsport author Adam Brouillard has shown the Euler spiral's use in optimizing theracing line during the corner entry portion of a turn.[12]
Raph Levien has released Spiro as a toolkit for curve design, especially font design, in 2007[13][14] under a free licence. This toolkit has been implemented quite quickly afterwards in the font design toolFontforge and the digital vector drawingInkscape.
Cutting a sphere along a spiral with width1/N and flattening out the resulting shape yields an Euler spiral whenn tends to the infinity.[15] If the sphere is theglobe, this produces amap projection whose distortion tends to zero asn tends to the infinity.[16]
Natural shapes of rats'whiskers are well approximated by segments of Euler spirals; for a single rat all of the whiskers can be approximated as segments of the same spiral.[17] The two parameters of theCesàro equation for an Euler spiral segment might give insight into thekeratinization mechanism of whisker growth.[18]
For a given Euler curve with:orthenwhere
The process of obtaining solution of(x,y) of an Euler spiral can thus be described as:
In the normalization process,Then
Generally the normalization reducesL′ to a small value (less than 1) and results in good converging characteristics of the Fresnel integral manageable with only a few terms (at a price of increasednumerical instability of the calculation, especially for biggerθ values.).
Given:Thenand
We scale down the Euler spiral by√60000, i.e. 100√6 to normalized Euler spiral that has:and
The two anglesθs are the same. This thus confirms that the original and normalized Euler spirals are geometrically similar. The locus of the normalized curve can be determined from Fresnel Integral, while the locus of the original Euler spiral can be obtained by scaling up or denormalizing.
Normalized Euler spirals can be expressed as:or expressed aspower series:
The normalized Euler spiral will converge to a single point in the limit as the parameter L approaches infinity, which can be expressed as:
Normalized Euler spirals have the following properties:and
Note that2RcLs = 1 also means1/Rc = 2Ls, in agreement with the last mathematical statement.