(idea) by alien_life_form Fri Jul 06 2001 at 13:11:23
A surface whose metric is equivalent to the metric of a plane. In other words, a surface that can be flattened without stretching.

A cylinder and a cone are developable, a sphere isn't. It can be proved that a surface is developable at a point iff its Gaussian curvature at that point is zero.

The fact that a sphere is not developable may be at the root of the earliest developments of topology and modern topography, at least as far as map-making is concerned.

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