the.com/conic
A cone's shadow play: slice it right, get a circle, ellipse, parabola, or hyperbola.
means Relating to a cone, especially the curves — circles, ellipses, parabolas, hyperbolas — produced by slicing one at different angles.
from From Latin conicus, from Greek konikos, from konos ('cone'), a word originally meaning a pine cone or peak — the Greeks noticed the same tapered shape in pine cones and spinning tops. Ancient geometers like Apollonius then borrowed the word for the solid shape, and later for the curves you get when you cut through it, giving math one of its oldest surviving technical vocabularies.
- origin
- All come from cutting one double cone
- orbits
- Planets, comets, and satellites all trace conics
- eccentricity
- One number decides the shape: 0 to infinity
- whispering rooms
- Elliptical ceilings bounce sound to one exact point