Osculating spheres to a family of curves.

The authors study the extrinsic conformal geometry of space forms involving pencils of circles or spheres. They consider curves orthogonal to a foliation of an open set of a 3-sphere by spheres and prove that the osculating spheres to the curves at points of a leaf form a pencil. They first prove the analogous result in a lower-dimensional case, that is, foliations of the 2-dimensional sphere and their orthogonal foliations. The 3-dimensional result, that is, the result for a foliation of (an open subset of) the 3-dimensional sphere by 2-dimensional spheres, is obtained using the de Sitter space, which is a model for the set of oriented spheres of the 3-dimensional sphere.