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A conic section, conic or a quadratic curve is a curve obtained from a cone's surface intersecting a plane. The three types of conic section are the hyperbola, the parabola, and the ellipse; the circle is a special case of the ellipse, though it was sometimes considered a fourth type.
In homogeneous coordinates, each conic section with the equation of a circle has the form + + = It can be proven that a conic section is a circle exactly when it contains (when extended to the complex projective plane ) the points I (1: i : 0) and J (1: − i : 0).
A family of conic sections of varying eccentricity share a focus point and directrix line, including an ellipse (red, e = 1/2), a parabola (green, e = 1), and a hyperbola (blue, e = 2). The conic of eccentricity 0 in this figure is an infinitesimal circle centered at the focus, and the conic of eccentricity ∞ is an infinitesimally separated ...
The vertices of a central conic can be determined by calculating the intersections of the conic and its axes — in other words, by solving the system consisting of the quadratic conic equation and the linear equation for alternately one or the other of the axes. Two or no vertices are obtained for each axis, since, in the case of the hyperbola ...
These results seem to run counter the general result since circles are special cases of conics. However, in a pappian projective plane a conic is a circle only if it passes through two specific points on the line at infinity, so a circle is determined by five non-collinear points, three in the affine plane and these two special points. Similar ...
The equation for a conic section with apex at the origin and tangent to the y axis is + (+) = alternately = + (+) where R is the radius of curvature at x = 0. This formulation is used in geometric optics to specify oblate elliptical ( K > 0 ), spherical ( K = 0 ), prolate elliptical ( 0 > K > −1 ), parabolic ( K = −1 ), and hyperbolic ( K ...
It is an affine image of the right-circular unit cone with equation + = . 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.
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. If 0 < e < 1 the conic is an ellipse, if e = 1 the conic is a parabola, and if e > 1 the conic is a hyperbola.