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A conic is the curve obtained as the intersection of a plane, called the cutting plane, with the surface of a double cone (a cone with two nappes).It is usually assumed that the cone is a right circular cone for the purpose of easy description, but this is not required; any double cone with some circular cross-section will suffice.
Coordinate surfaces of the conical coordinates. The constants b and c were chosen as 1 and 2, respectively. The red sphere represents r = 2, the blue elliptic cone aligned with the vertical z-axis represents μ=cosh(1) and the yellow elliptic cone aligned with the (green) x-axis corresponds to ν 2 = 2/3.
If the conic is non-degenerate, the conjugates of a point always form a line and the polarity defined by the conic is a bijection between the points and lines of the extended plane containing the conic (that is, the plane together with the points and line at infinity). If the point p lies on the conic Q, the polar line of p is the tangent line ...
If the cone is right circular the intersection of a plane with the lateral surface is a conic section. In general, however, the base may be any shape [2] and the apex may lie anywhere (though it is usually assumed that the base is bounded and therefore has finite area, and that the apex lies outside the plane of the base). Contrasted with right ...
The problem of intersection of an ellipse/hyperbola/parabola with another conic section leads to a system of quadratic equations, which can be solved in special cases easily by elimination of one coordinate. Special properties of conic sections may be used to obtain a solution. In general the intersection points can be determined by solving the ...
requiring a conic to pass through a point imposes a linear condition on the coordinates: for a fixed (,), the equation + + + + + = is a linear equation in (,,,,,); by dimension counting , five constraints (that the curve passes through five points) are necessary to specify a conic, as each constraint cuts the dimension of possibilities by 1 ...
As in all cases in the physical world, the trajectory is always an approximation of a parabola. The presence of air resistance, for example, always distorts the shape, although at low speeds, the shape is a good approximation of a parabola. At higher speeds, such as in ballistics, the shape is highly distorted and does not resemble a parabola.
More generally, when the directrix is an ellipse, or any conic section, and the apex is an arbitrary point not on the plane of , one obtains an elliptic cone [4] (also called a conical quadric or quadratic cone), [5] which is a special case of a quadric surface. [4] [5]