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The Use of and Elipse to Help Pool Player

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Architecture, games, astronomy and medicine have something in common, even if it’s not obvious at first sight. What connects these different areas is called Conic Sections. Where do they come from? Conic Sections are figures formed by the intersection of a plane and a right circular cone. A conic section may be a circle, an ellipse, a parabola, or a hyperbola . They were first discovered by a Greek mathematician, Menaechmus. He wanted to come up with a model that showed all three different conic sections. With the help of Appollonius, they came up with the “Double Napped Cone”, which clearly shows all three different shapes. In this project, I’m going to study and analyze specifically the ellipse. What is an ellipse? It’s the set of points on a plane whose sum of the distance of two fixed points is constant . The main parts on an ellipse are: center, foci and vertices. The focus is the most important and the most used in real life. The foci determine the shape of the ellipse, therefore the vertices, endpoints, major axis and minor axis. The ellipse is found mostly in architecture and astronomy. For example, in London, the St. Paul Cathedral has an elliptical form. Studies have proven that if two people stand at the two foci, and one of them whispers, the other guy can hear it clearly. In astronomy, lots of people confuse ellipse with eclipse; THEY ARE TWO COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS! The ellipse is very useful to astronomers because it defines the distance between the sun

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