Cuspidal edge
In mathematics a cusp, sometimes called spinode in old texts, is a point on a curve where a moving point on the curve must start to move backward. A typical example is given in the figure. A cusp is thus a type of singular point of a curve.
For a plane curve defined by a analytic parametric equation
a cusp is a point where the derivative of each of f and g is zero, and the directional derivative, in the direction of the tangent, changes sign (the direction of the tangent is the direction of the slope ). Cusps are local singularities in the sense that they involve only one value of the parameter t, in contrast to self-intersection points that involve more than one value. In some contexts, the condition on the directional derivative may be omitted, although, in this case, the singularity may look like a regular point.
For a curve defined by smooth implicit equation
cusps are points where the terms of lowest degree of the Taylor expansion of F are a power of a linear polynomial; however, not all singular points that have this property are cusps. The theory of Puiseux series implies that, if F is an analytic function (for example a polynomial), a linear change of coordinates allows the curve to be parametrized, in a neighborhood of the cusp, as
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