conic section
- noun
- /ˈkoʊnɪk ˈsɛkʃən/
- Specialized
:
sección cónica
- The three primary types of conic sections are ellipse, parabola, and hyperbola, each defined by their unique intersection properties.
Examples
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And at least in my personal experience from teaching precalculus, conic sections are the hardest thing for students to learn in a precalculus class.
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That night, as he knelt with Milla in their bedroom, his mind strayed toward circles and ellipses, the austere perfection of conic sections.
Fiction book (2002) -
So we ended up with conic sections, but we if we now take the ratio of these two.
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You know, you remember the Greeks, they had these conic sections, they had...
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Many, many centuries later, Kepler used precisely the ellipse and other conic sections to explain how planets actually go around the sun.
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Special improvements include discontinuity stress calculations for conic sections and stress checks for the WRC 107 local stress calculations.
Academic text (1997) -
Beam Two: ray tracing software for designers (or advanced students) of optical systems: lenses, mirrors, irises, conic sections, diagnostic plots, least squares optimizer, etc.
Academic text (1991) -
A conic section can be an ellipse, which is created when a plane cuts through a cone at an angle.
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In geometry, a conic section is a type of curve that can be formed by slicing a cone parallel to its side.
Synonyms
A curve made when a flat surface cuts a cone, like an ellipse or parabola
Surface Forms
Morphology
The term names a slice or section of a cone: combining 'conic' (having the form of a cone) with 'section' (a slice or area formed by cutting) directly yields the geometric meaning. Although somewhat technical, the compound is compositionally transparent and cross-linguistically comparable, so a B1 learner who knows both constituents can infer the MWE's meaning.
Etymology
The noun conic section comes from a simple picture: imagine cutting a cone with a flat slice and the edge of the slice makes different curves like an ellipse, a parabola, or a hyperbola. So conic, meaning the cone, and section, meaning a cut, together explain why the phrase means 'a curve made by cutting a cone'.
