{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/orange-peels-and-fresnel-integrals","title":"Orange Peels and Fresnel Integrals","arxiv_id":"1202.3033","date":"2012-02-14","proceeding":null,"authors":["Laurent Bartholdi","André G. Henriques"],"abstract":"There are two standard ways of peeling an orange: either cut the skin along meridians, or cut it along a spiral. We consider here the second method, and study the shape of the spiral strip, when unfolded on a table. We derive a formula that describes the corresponding flattened-out spiral. Cutting the peel with progressively thinner strip widths, we obtain a sequence of increasingly long spirals. We show that, after rescaling, these spirals tends to a definite shape, known as the Euler spiral. The Euler spiral has applications in many fields of science. In optics, the illumination intensity at a point behind a slit is computed from the distance between two points on the Euler spiral. The Euler spiral also provides optimal curvature for train tracks between a straight run and an upcoming bend. It is striking that it can be also obtained with an orange and a kitchen knife.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.3033v1","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1202.3033v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"orange-peels-and-fresnel-integrals","repo_url":"https://github.com/jackastner/peel_spiral","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}