Sunday, February 7, 2010

True or false question on ellipses?

If the eccentricity of an ellipse (in other words, the value e) is close to zero, then the ellipse looks almost like a circle.





True or False?





Do you know why?





Thankyou so so much!





Merry Christmas everyone! Have a wonderful and safe holiday!True or false question on ellipses?
The eccentricity of an ellipse, defined as c/a, is a value on the interval [0,1] that describes the ';ovalness'; of an ellipse.





In other words, the eccentricity of an ellipse is equal to c (the distance from the center to a focus) divided by a (the distance from the center to a vertex).





The closer to 0 the eccentricity is, the more the ellipse looks like a circle; in fact, an ellipse with an eccentricity of EXACTLY ZERO is really a circle. The larger the eccentricity is, the more strongly marked oval shape the ellipse has.

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