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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.
The linear eccentricity of an ellipse or hyperbola, denoted c (or sometimes f or e), is the distance between its center and either of its two foci. The eccentricity can be defined as the ratio of the linear eccentricity to the semimajor axis a : that is, e = c a {\displaystyle e={\frac {c}{a}}} (lacking a center, the linear eccentricity for ...
In elliptic geometry, two lines perpendicular to a given line must intersect. In fact, all perpendiculars to a given line intersect at a single point called the absolute pole of that line. Every point corresponds to an absolute polar line of which it is the absolute pole. Any point on this polar line forms an absolute conjugate pair with the
Diameter: a line segment whose endpoints lie on the circle and that passes through the centre; or the length of such a line segment. This is the largest distance between any two points on the circle. It is a special case of a chord, namely the longest chord for a given circle, and its length is twice the length of a radius.
For an ellipse, two diameters are conjugate if and only if the tangent line to the ellipse at an endpoint of one diameter is parallel to the other diameter. Each pair of conjugate diameters of an ellipse has a corresponding tangent parallelogram, sometimes called a bounding parallelogram (skewed compared to a bounding rectangle).
Equal chords are subtended by equal angles from the center of the circle. A chord that passes through the center of a circle is called a diameter and is the longest chord of that specific circle. If the line extensions (secant lines) of chords AB and CD intersect at a point P, then their lengths satisfy AP·PB = CP·PD (power of a point theorem).
The semi-minor axis of an ellipse runs from the center of the ellipse (a point halfway between and on the line running between the foci) to the edge of the ellipse. The semi-minor axis is half of the minor axis. The minor axis is the longest line segment perpendicular to the major axis that connects two points on the ellipse's edge.
If a circle q passes through two distinct points A and A' which are inverses with respect to a circle k, then the circles k and q are orthogonal. If the circles k and q are orthogonal, then a straight line passing through the center O of k and intersecting q, does so at inverse points with respect to k. Given a triangle OAB in which O is the ...