11.1 Introduction

In this Chapter, we shall study about curves, viz., circles, ellipses, parabolas and hyperbolas. The names parabola and hyperbola are given by Apollonius. These curves are in fact, known as conic sections or more commonly conics because they can be obtained as intersections of a plane with a double napped right circular cone. These curves have a very wide range of applications in fields such as planetary motion, design of telescopes and antennas, reflectors in flashlights and automobile headlights, etc.