Representations of compact Lie groups and the osculating spaces of their orbits

Several classes of irreducible orthogonal representations of compact Lie groups that are of importance in Differential Geometry have the property that the second osculating spaces of all of their nontrivial orbits coincide with the representation space. We say that representations with this property are of class O^2. Our approach in the present paper will be to find restrictions on the class O^2 and then apply them to classify variationally complete and taut representations. The known classifications of cohomogeneity one and two orthogonal representations and more generally of polar representations will also follow easily.