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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.
Congruent conic sections Two conic sections are congruent if their eccentricities and one other distinct parameter characterizing them are equal. Their eccentricities establish their shapes, equality of which is sufficient to establish similarity, and the second parameter then establishes size.
More generally, when the directrix is an ellipse, or any conic section, and the apex is an arbitrary point not on the plane of , one obtains an elliptic cone [4] (also called a conical quadric or quadratic cone), [5] which is a special case of a quadric surface.
From the fact, that the affine image of a conic section is a conic section of the same type (ellipse, parabola,...), one gets: 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).
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.
In Euclidean geometry, a circumconic is a conic section that passes through the three vertices of a triangle, [1] and an inconic is a conic section inscribed in the sides, possibly extended, of a triangle. [2] Suppose A, B, C are distinct non-collinear points, and let ABC denote the triangle whose vertices are A, B, C.
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.
The hyperbola is one of the three kinds of conic section, formed by the intersection of a plane and a double cone. (The other conic sections are the parabola and the ellipse. A circle is a special case of an ellipse.) If the plane intersects both halves of the double cone but does not pass through the apex of the cones, then the conic is a ...