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An ellipse (red) obtained as the intersection of a cone with an inclined plane. Ellipse: notations Ellipses: examples with increasing eccentricity. In mathematics, an ellipse is a plane curve surrounding two focal points, such that for all points on the curve, the sum of the two distances to the focal points is a constant.
An ellipse has two axes and two foci Unlike most other elementary shapes, such as the circle and square , there is no algebraic equation to determine the perimeter of an ellipse . Throughout history, a large number of equations for approximations and estimates have been made for the perimeter of an ellipse.
For example, the first and fourth of Euclid's postulates, that there is a unique line between any two points and that all right angles are equal, hold in elliptic geometry. Postulate 3, that one can construct a circle with any given center and radius, fails if "any radius" is taken to mean "any real number", but holds if it is taken to mean ...
A blue circle, graphed with a red ellipse. An elliptical dome has an elliptical base, and an ellipsoidal dome has a circular base. An ellipse, the "reflecting," "whispering gallery" property of the foci F and F' illustrated: The distance from F to F' may be great, but a whisperer at F can be heard, as F' .
The area of a plane region or plane area refers to the area of a shape or planar lamina, while surface area refers to the area of an open surface or the boundary of a three-dimensional object. Area can be understood as the amount of material with a given thickness that would be necessary to fashion a model of the shape, or the amount of paint ...
Every triangle can be inscribed in an ellipse, called its Steiner circumellipse or simply its Steiner ellipse, whose center is the triangle's centroid. Every triangle has an infinitude of inscribed ellipses. One of them is a circle, and one of them is the Steiner inellipse which is tangent to the triangle at the midpoints of the sides.
The area of the Steiner ellipse is -fold of the triangle's area. Proof. A) For an equilateral triangle the Steiner ellipse is the circumcircle, which is the only ellipse, that fulfills the preconditions. The desired ellipse has to contain the triangle reflected at the center of the ellipse.
Flattening is a measure of the compression of a circle or sphere along a diameter to form an ellipse or an ellipsoid of revolution respectively. Other terms used are ellipticity , or oblateness . The usual notation for flattening is f {\displaystyle f} and its definition in terms of the semi-axes a {\displaystyle a} and b {\displaystyle b} of ...