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Conic Sections

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7 views2 pages

Conic Sections

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sheyncedo
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Conic Sections

Who discovered conic sections?


The knowledge of conic sections can be traced back to Ancient
Greece. Menaechmus is credited with the discovery of conic sections
around the years 360-350 B.C.; it is reported that he used them in his two
solutions to the problem of "doubling the cube". Following the work of
Menaechmus, these curves were investigated by Aristaeus and of Euclid.
The next major contribution to the growth of conic section theory was
made by the great Archimedes. Though he obtained many theorems
concerning the conics, it does not appear that he published any work devoted solely to them.
Apollonius, on the other hand, is known as the "Great Geometer" on the basis of his text Conic
Sections, an eight-"book" (or in modern terms, "chapter") series on the subject. The first four
books have come down to us in the original Ancient Greek, but books V-VII are known only from
an Arabic translation, while the eighth book has been lost entirely.
In the years following Apollonius the Greek geometric tradition started to decline, though
there were developments in astronomy, trigonometry, and algebra (Eves, 1990, p. 182).
Pappus, who lived about 300 A.D., furthered the study of conic sections somewhat in minor
ways. After Pappus, however, conic sections were nearly forgotten for 12 centuries. It was not
until the sixteenth century, in part as a consequence of the invention of printing and the resulting
dissemination of Apollonius' work, that any significant progress in the theory or applications of
conic sections occurred; but when it did occur, in the work of Kepler, it was as part of one of the
major advances in the history of science.

The Conic Sections


Conic sections a locus (or path) of a point that moves such that the ratio of its distance
from a fixed point (called the focus) and a fixed line (called the directrix).

CIRCLE
A circle is the locus of points in a plane at a given distance from a fixed point.
The given distance is called the radius and the fixed point is called the center.

PARABOLA
A parabola is the locus of points in a plane equidistant from a given line and a given point not on
the line. The line is called the directrix, and the point is called the focus

ELLIPSE
An ellipse is the locus of points in a plane the sum of whose distances from two
given points is a constant. The constant, of course, must be greater than the
distance between the two given points.

HYPERBPOLA
A hyperbola is the locus of points in a plane the absolute value of the difference of
whose distances from two given points is a positive constant

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