Real Life Applications of Conics

The reflective and structural properties of the circle, parabola, ellipse and hyperbola — developed algebraically in §§5.2–5.6 — are exactly what makes each shape the natural engineering or physical choice in the situations below. The next three subsections (§5.7.1–§5.7.3) survey where each conic shows up; §§5.7.4–5.7.6 then prove why, via each conic's reflective property, before applying …