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<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
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<title>Lampshades and Analytic Geometry - Comfortably Numbered</title>
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<a href="/"><span class="left-word">Comfortably</span> <span class="right-word">Numbered</span></a>
</div>
</header>
<article id="postcontent" class="centered">
<section>
<h1>Lampshades and Analytic Geometry</h1>
<center><em><p>Exploring conic sections with lampshades, potatoes, and smoke simulations.</p>
</em></center>
<h4>Sunday, December 8, 2013 · 5 min read</h4>
<p class="dropcap">A couple of months ago, I was sitting at the dining table,
and I caught myself staring at the lamp. And I had just finished reading about
conics, so I immediately saw something awesome. Take a moment to think about
it. Do you see it?
<p><img src="static/hyperbolic_lamp.png" width=200 />
<p>I saw that the pattern on the wall was very special. It belongs to a class
of curves called <em>hyperbolas</em>. Let's see how that happens.
<p>To start off, how does that lamp create a pattern on the wall in the first
place? Well, one way to tackle this is to think about where the light is going.
What parts does the lampshade actually shade, and where is there light? A
clever trick here would be to get a smoke machine to create some smoke around
the lamp. You can see where the the light is going in the smoke. It's fun, like
a search beam (or the Batman sign).
<p>Unfortunately, they don't sell dry ice to minors (partly because you can do
really dangerous things with it, and partly because adults want to keep the fun
stuff to themselves), so I did the next best thing: overkill. I created a model
in Blender and simulated some smoke.
<blockquote><em>Sidenote: You haven't had a steep learning curve until you've
tried to do something trivial with Blender. All the important functions are
hidden away in various keystrokes, and there are all sorts of pitfalls all over
the place. It's an amazing technology made with absolutely no consideration for
beginners.</em></blockquote>
<p>Rants aside, here's my snazzy modern Blender lamp with a funky lampshade and
hardwood stem. Pretty, eh? It's just a sliced up cone (called a
<em>frustum</em>) with a really bright divinely ethereal halo placed inside. I
put a screen behind it to catch the projection.
<p><img src="static/conic-1.png"/>
<p>You can even see our mystery curve! Now let's blow around some smoke (easier
said than done; Blender's smoke simulation takes a lot of Googling to get
right).
<p><img src="static/conic-2.png"/>
<p>Hmm, that looks like a cone of light coming out the top—conics! The
cone kind of makes sense if you think about it (if it doesn't, think about how
a spotlight works). In fact, there are two cones; one shooting out the top and
an upside-down one shooting out the bottom. Together, they make a sort of
straight-lined hourglass shape.
<p>We want to find the nature of that curve, so we want to do some analytic
geometry. Let's say our double-cone hourglass of illumination is centered at
the origin. What equation describes a cone? Well, a cone is like several
circles of increasing (or decreasing) size stacked above each other (like a
pile of tires of different radii). For convenience, we can say that each
circle's radius is equal to it's height above the origin.
<p>The equation of a circle is $x^2 + y^2 = r^2$, and if $r = z$, we have
$x^2 + y^2 = z^2$. If we plug that into a graphing application, we get:
<p><img src="static/conic-3.png"/>
<p>Note that we're doing several simplifications here, most importantly the
width of the cone. We could have picked a narrower cone by squishing or
stretching our equation, but this one is easy to deal with.
<p>Now the screen: that's just a vertical plane. We describe that with $x=c$
for some constant $c$ (let's pick 1 for simplicity).
<p>And now we can solve for the intersection: just substiture in $x=1$ into
the first equation: \[ 1^2 + y^2 = z^2 \]
<p>Or, more canonically: \[ z^2 - y^2
= 1 \]
<p>Wolfram|Alpha <a
href="http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=z%5E2-y%5E2+%3D+1">plots this</a>
for us.
<p>That looks perfect. This is indeed the equation of a hyperbola you find in
math textbooks (except simplified). So <strong>Result 1: When a vertical plane
slices a cone, the result is a <em>hyperbola</em>.</strong>
<h3>Thus emboldened, we experiment</h3>
<p>Now we get to ask the magic question: <q>what happens if…?</q>. In
particular, what would have happened if I had decided to play with the lamp and
knocked it over? When you tilt the lamp, is it still a hyperbola?
<p>Turns out, only to a point. Let's see how. When we tilt a plane, we go from
$x=c$ to $z = mx + c$. Here, $m$ is the inclination or slope of the plane
[insert your own inclined plane joke here], and $c$ is how far it is from the
origin (once more, we'll let this be 1 without loss of generality). When we
substitute, we get:
\[ x^2 + y^2 = (mx+c)^2 = (mx + 1)^2 = m^2x^2 + 2mx + 1 \]
\[ y^2 + [(1-m^2)x^2 - 2mx] = 1 \]
<p>Now, the quadratic $x^2$ term can either be positive, negative, or 0. If
it's negative, then $m > 1$. Of course, we get a hyperbola when the $x^2$
term is negative (just like above). When $ m > 1 $, the slope is steeper, or
closer to vertical.
<p>If it's positive, then $m < 1$. We get an <strong>ellipse</strong> when
the $x^2$ term is positive. When $ m < 1 $, the slope is flatter, or closer
to horizontal. Notice how this plane will chop through just one of the cones,
but all the way through. So, intuitively, you should get a stretched circle.
<p>Ellipses show up all over the place. Planets orbit stars in ellipses (though
this truth cost some scientists their reputation, and in some cases, lives).
<p>Finally, that term can be 0 if $m=1$. That means the plane is parallel to
the side of the cone. Think about how the intersection would look. It only
intersects one of the cones, but the intersection doesn't chop all the way
through like an ellipse. Removing that term gives us a quadratic equation, and
the resulting curve is called a <strong>parabola</strong>. Parabolas show up
when you're throwing things. Baseballs follow parabolic arcs in the air when
you throw them.
<p>There three curves are called the <em>conic sections</em>, and they are
plenty of fun to study.
<h3>Want more?</h3>
<ul>
<li>Buy some potatoes, cut them into cones, and slice them for a while to convince yourself that I'm making some sense around here. Don't trust me.
<li>Since the lampshade's top and bottom openings have different diameters, the top cone and bottom cones aren't necessarily the same, and so we don't necessarily have a perfectly symmetrical hyperbola. Find the unique point where you can place the light bulb in the lamp so that the cones are in fact the same.
<li>You may have heard of the pencil-and-string way to build an ellipse. You can stick two pushpins into a piece of paper, and tie each end of a piece of string to one pushpin. Then trace the curve you get with a pencil by keeping the string taught—it's an ellipse! In other words, given a point on an ellipse, the sum of the distance to each pushpin is a constant. Each pushpin's position is called a <em>focus</em> of an ellipse. This is a perfectly valid definition of an ellipse.<br/>What is the corresponding definition for a hyporbola? If you're ambitious, try to get the equation of an ellipse given the above definition.
<li>A parabola is the set of all points that are equidistant from a point and a <em>line</em> (the distance from a point to a line is the length of the perpendicular segment from the point to the line). Can you prove this?
<li>Without graphing or drawing or anything, try to imagine what happens to a hyperbola as you keep on zooming out. What does it look like?<br/>You get a pair of intersecting lines called the <em>asymptotes</em>. What are the equations of the asymptotes of $y^2 - x^2 = 1$?
</ul>
<p>P.S. The lesson here wasn't about conic sections. The lesson here was that
there is really cool math in <em>everything</em>. Even lampshades. And you
gotta grok math to see them.
<br/><br/>Cheers,<br/>Hardmath123
</section>
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