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Conics and quadrics

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Geometry Revealed

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Abstract

Even though there isn’t to our knowledge any important open problem concerning the conics – for quadrics it’s a different story – we are going to stay with them for a long time, but talk about the quadrics only very briefly. We hope, however, that the chapter will please many readers. More knowledgeable – but not necessarily omniscient – readers may skip all the beginning material and just look at Sects. IV.8 and IV.9. Here are our motivations: we have already stated how much the teaching of geometry , however useful it is nowadays, has almost completely disappeared from instruction, whether in middle or upper schools, or in the university. If a few circles remain, the other conic sections are gone, even though they are an integral part of many things in our everyday lives. Here are a few examples, to which readers may append their own.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, IHÉS, Bures-sur-Yvette, 35 route des Chartres, 91440, Bures-sur-Yvette, France

    Marcel Berger

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Berger, M. (2010). Conics and quadrics. In: Geometry Revealed. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-70997-8_4

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