Parabola as a Locus of Centers of Circles
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A parabola is the set of all the points that are equidistant from a fixed point (the focus, red point) and a fixed line
(the directrix, dashed green line).
Contributed by: Abraham Gadalla (June 2012)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
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In this Demonstration, is the origin
.
Let be the distance from
to
and
be the radius of
. If
is vertical, then the equation of the parabola is
, where
is the focal distance
.
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