Author: Juyoung Park & Sedecember
juyoung.parkk8@gmail.com & a3060100s@gmail.com
Ever wondered how the formulas for parabolas, ellipses, circles, and hyperbolas came out?
This conic sections note includes the derivation of the following general formulas:
- Parabola
- Ellipse & Circle
- Hyperbola
These derivations are the summary of our notes that come from self-studying the conic sections topic outside of school with my friend Sed.
Sed and I have derived these formulas during the 2-week school holidays to help our attempt at the NZ Scholarship Calculus examination (and also because we were bored and had nothing to do…).
Since these formula derivations were self-taught from basically nothing but the definitions of parabolas, ellipses, circles and hyperbolas, some information may be inaccurate, and require fact-checking.
‘Conic sections’, is basically the shape of the cross sectional shape when you intersect a plane to a cone like this
Image from here