14 Feb
2007
14 Feb
'07
11:29 p.m.
On 2/14/07, James Propp <propp@math.wisc.edu> wrote:
It'd be interesting to see an animation that shows, side by side, a plane cutting a cone and the associated quadratic plane curve (rotated in 3-space in some standard way) evolving as the latter becomes more and more eccentric, with fixed major axis AB; perhaps one could develop some intuition about the way in which the points on the line AB that don't lie between A and B "jump" into the locus when the cutting plane becomes tangent to the cone.
Hi Jim and all, This kind of animation is easy to construct with, for example, Graphing Calculator. http://www.pacifict.com ... at least download the free viewer and see if you can run the demo from that, maybe. It's pretty fun. --Joshua Zucker