Conics

Five, Four. Three. Two. One. Lift off. The rocket launches off the ground headed toward space. Unmanned spaceships, and spaceships in general, are designed by aerospace engineers. These engineers are investigating reusable rockets that return safely to Earth to be used again. Someday, rockets may carry passengers to the International Space Station and beyond. One essential math concept for aerospace engineers is that of conics. In this chapter, you will learn about conics, including circles, parabolas, ellipses, and hyperbolas. Then you will use what you learn to investigate systems of nonlinear equations.

Sections

• Distance and Midpoint Formulas; Circles — using the Distance and Midpoint Formulas, writing equations of circles in standard form, and graphing circles.
• Parabolas — graphing vertical and horizontal parabolas and solving applications involving parabolas.
• Ellipses — graphing ellipses centered at the origin or another point, finding equations of ellipses, and solving applications involving ellipses.
• Hyperbolas — graphing hyperbolas centered at the origin or another point and identifying conic sections from their equations.
• Solve Systems of Nonlinear Equations — solving nonlinear systems by graphing, substitution, and elimination and using nonlinear systems in applications.

This chapter introduction is adapted from Intermediate Algebra 2e, Chapter 11 Introduction by Lynn Marecek and Andrea Honeycutt Mathis, © OpenStax, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Access the original for free at OpenStax. Changes: omitted the opening photograph and recast the chapter outline as a section list.