In Riemannian geometry, a Jacobi field is a vector field along a geodesic in a Riemannian manifold describing the difference between the geodesic and an "infinitesimally close" geodesic. In other words, the Jacobi fields along a geodesic form the tangent space to the geodesic in the space of all geodesics. They are named after Carl Jacobi. Definitions and properties Jacobi fields can be obtained in the following way: Take a smooth one parameter family of geodesics with , then is a Jacobi field, and describes the behavior of the geodesics in an infinitesimal neighborhood of a given geodesic . A vector field J along a geodesic is said to be a Jacobi field if it satisfies the Jacobi equation: where D denotes the covariant derivative with respect to the Levi-Civita connection, R the Riemann curvature tensor, the tangent vector field, and t is the parameter of the geodesic. On a complete Riemannian manifold, for any Jacobi field there is a family of geodesics describing the field (as in the preceding paragraph). The Jacobi equation is a linear, second order ordinary differential equation; in particular, values of and at one point of uniquely determine the Jacobi field. Furthermore, the set of Jacobi fields along a given geodesic forms a real vector space of dimension twice the dimension of the manifold. As trivial examples of Jacobi fields one can consider and . These correspond respectively to the following families of reparametrisations: and . Any Jacobi field can be represented in a unique way as a sum , where is a linear combination of trivial Jacobi fields and is orthogonal to , for all . The field then corresponds to the same variation of geodesics as , only with changed parameterizations. Motivating example On a unit sphere, the geodesics through the North pole are great circles. Consider two such geodesics and with natural parameter, , separated by an angle . The geodesic distance is Computing this requires knowing the geodesics. The most interesting information is just that , for any . Instead, we can consider the derivative with respect to at : Notice that we still detect the intersection of the geodesics at . Notice further that to calculate this derivative we do not actually need to know , rather, all we need do is solve the equation , for some given initial data. Jacobi fields give a natural generalization of this phenomenon