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As you already know, the interior of a circle is represented by an inequality. For example,

$x^2+y^2\leq1$

for the unit circle. Today I was thinking by myself and I wondered if there is a curve that could represent every point inside of a circle. Maybe with a spiral like this,

If you can't represent it perfectly with a curve, what would be the closest way to represent it?

This question is asked merely out of curiosity, it may be completely irrelevant or meaningless :)

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    @Jonas, @Noah: thanks, I'll ask in what way the Peano curve is not 1-to-1 separately.2011-03-29

1 Answers 1

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Since topologically a disc and a square are the same, most of what you might want to know about this falls under the heading of Space-filling curves. To summarize, the answer to your main question is that the disc $D^2$ is the image of the interval $[0,1]$ under a continuous map, but not a one-to-one (non-intersecting) continuous map. So it depends on exactly what you mean by curve.

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    @yoyo: OK. Is the obvious 'interpret the cartesian coords as polar coords' homeomorphic?2011-03-29