brachistochrone

brachistochrone, the planar curve on which a body subjected only to the force of gravity will slide (without friction) between two points in the least possible time. Finding the curve was a problem first posed by Galileo. In the late 17th century the Swiss mathematician Johann Bernoulli issued a challenge to solve this problem. He and his older brother Jakob, along with Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Isaac Newton, and others, found the curve to be a cycloid. (See also calculus of variations; isoperimetric problem.)