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In mathematics, a parabola is a plane curve which is mirror-symmetrical and is approximately U-shaped. It fits several superficially different mathematical descriptions, which can all be proved to define exactly the same curves. One description of a parabola involves a point (the focus) and a line (the directrix). The focus does not lie on the ...
Successive parabolic interpolation is a technique for finding the extremum (minimum or maximum) of a continuous unimodal function by successively fitting parabolas (polynomials of degree two) to a function of one variable at three unique points or, in general, a function of n variables at 1+n(n+3)/2 points, and at each iteration replacing the "oldest" point with the extremum of the fitted ...
The universal parabolic constant is the red length divided by the green length. The universal parabolic constant is a mathematical constant.. It is defined as the ratio, for any parabola, of the arc length of the parabolic segment formed by the latus rectum to the focal parameter.
A three-dimensional version of parabolic coordinates is obtained by rotating the two-dimensional system about the symmetry axis of the parabolas. Parabolic coordinates have found many applications, e.g., the treatment of the Stark effect and the potential theory of the edges.
A parabolic segment is the region bounded by a parabola and line. To find the area of a parabolic segment, Archimedes considers a certain inscribed triangle. The base of this triangle is the given chord of the parabola, and the third vertex is the point on the parabola such that the tangent to the parabola at that point is parallel to the chord.
In this position, the hyperbolic paraboloid opens downward along the x-axis and upward along the y-axis (that is, the parabola in the plane x = 0 opens upward and the parabola in the plane y = 0 opens downward). Any paraboloid (elliptic or hyperbolic) is a translation surface, as it can be generated by a moving parabola directed by a second ...
An illustration of Newton's method. In numerical analysis, the Newton–Raphson method, also known simply as Newton's method, named after Isaac Newton and Joseph Raphson, is a root-finding algorithm which produces successively better approximations to the roots (or zeroes) of a real-valued function.
In classical mechanics and ballistics, the parabola of safety or safety parabola is the envelope of the parabolic trajectories of projectiles shot from a certain point with a given speed at different angles to horizon in a fixed vertical plane.