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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.
The Steiner conic or more precisely Steiner's generation of a conic, named after the Swiss mathematician Jakob Steiner, is an alternative method to define a non-degenerate projective conic section in a projective plane over a field. The usual definition of a conic uses a quadratic form (see Quadric (projective geometry)). Another alternative ...
A pencil of confocal ellipses and hyperbolas is specified by choice of linear eccentricity c (the x-coordinate of one focus) and can be parametrized by the semi-major axis a (the x-coordinate of the intersection of a specific conic in the pencil and the x-axis). When 0 < a < c the conic is a hyperbola; when c < a the conic is an ellipse.
John Casey (1885) Analytic Geometry of the Point, Line, Circle, and Conic Sections, link from Internet Archive. Katz, Victor J. (1998), A History of Mathematics: An Introduction (2nd Ed.), Reading: Addison Wesley Longman, ISBN 0-321-01618-1; Mikhail Postnikov (1982) Lectures in Geometry Semester I Analytic Geometry via Internet Archive
Any plane section of an elliptic cone is a conic section. Obviously, any right circular cone contains circles. This is also true, but less obvious, in the general case (see circular section). The intersection of an elliptic cone with a concentric sphere is a spherical conic.
Media in category "Conic sections" This category contains only the following file. Drawing an ellipse via two tacks a loop and a pen 2.jpg 480 × 640; 24 KB
In mathematics, the matrix representation of conic sections permits the tools of linear algebra to be used in the study of conic sections. It provides easy ways to calculate a conic section's axis , vertices , tangents and the pole and polar relationship between points and lines of the plane determined by the conic.
It is also possible to describe all conic sections in terms of a single focus and a single directrix, which is a given line not containing the focus. A conic is defined as the locus of points for each of which the distance to the focus divided by the distance to the directrix is a fixed positive constant, called the eccentricity e.