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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 ...
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 called as a fourth type. The ancient Greek mathematicians studied conic sections, culminating around 200 BC with Apollonius of Perga's systematic work on their properties.
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.
In mathematics, the eccentricity of a conic section is a non-negative real number that uniquely characterizes its shape. One can think of the eccentricity as a measure of how much a conic section deviates from being circular. In particular: The eccentricity of a circle is 0. The eccentricity of an ellipse which is not a circle is between 0 and 1.
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.
The ellipse, parabola, and hyperbola are viewed as conics in projective geometry, and each conic determines a relation of pole and polar between points and lines. Using these concepts, "two diameters are conjugate when each is the polar of the figurative point of the other." [5] Only one of the conjugate diameters of a hyperbola cuts the curve.
In conic sections, it is said of two ellipses, two hyperbolas, or an ellipse and a hyperbola which share both foci with each other. If an ellipse and a hyperbola are confocal, they are perpendicular to each other. In optics, it means that one focus or image point of one lens is the same as one focus of the next lens.
A hyperbola and its conjugate may be constructed as conic sections obtained from an intersecting plane that meets tangent double cones sharing the same apex. Each cone has an axis, and the plane section is parallel to the plane formed by the axes. Using analytic geometry, the hyperbolas satisfy the symmetric equations