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Conics, also known as conic sections to emphasize their three-dimensional geometry, arise as the intersection of a plane with a cone. Degeneracy occurs when the plane contains the apex of the cone or when the cone degenerates to a cylinder and the plane is parallel to the axis of the cylinder. See Conic section#Degenerate cases for details.
A degenerate conic is a conic section (a second-degree plane curve, defined by a polynomial equation of degree two) that fails to be an irreducible curve. A point is a degenerate circle , namely one with radius 0.
All the conic sections share a reflection property that can be stated as: All mirrors in the shape of a non-degenerate conic section reflect light coming from or going toward one focus toward or away from the other focus. In the case of the parabola, the second focus needs to be thought of as infinitely far away, so that the light rays going ...
Degenerate conics follow by continuity (the theorem is true for non-degenerate conics, and thus holds in the limit of degenerate conic). A short elementary proof of Pascal's theorem in the case of a circle was found by van Yzeren (1993), based on the proof in (Guggenheimer 1967). This proof proves the theorem for circle and then generalizes it ...
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.
If a set of points is not in general linear position, it is called a degenerate case or degenerate configuration, which implies that they satisfy a linear relation that need not always hold. A fundamental application is that, in the plane, five points determine a conic, as long as the points are in general linear position (no three are collinear).
In mathematics, a quadric or quadric surface (quadric hypersurface in higher dimensions), is a generalization of conic sections (ellipses, parabolas, and hyperbolas).It is a hypersurface (of dimension D) in a (D + 1)-dimensional space, and it is defined as the zero set of an irreducible polynomial of degree two in D + 1 variables; for example, D = 1 in the case of conic sections.
The space of (possibly degenerate) conics in the complex projective plane CP 2 can be identified with the complex projective space CP 5 (since each conic is defined by a homogeneous degree-2 polynomial in three variables, with 6 complex coefficients, and multiplying such a polynomial by a non-zero complex number does not change the conic).