Parabolic Envelope from Congruent Triangles

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Consider a line and a point
not on
. Drag the orange point
along
. Draw a vertical line
from
. The perpendicular bisector
of
meets
at a point
that traces out a parabola and
is tangent to the parabola. The focus and directrix of the parabola are
and
because
is isoceles. The part of the vertical line m inside the parabola is the reflection in
of the ray
.
Contributed by: Harry Calkins (March 2011)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
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"Parabolic Envelope from Congruent Triangles"
http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/ParabolicEnvelopeFromCongruentTriangles/
Wolfram Demonstrations Project
Published: March 7 2011