Ellipse
The semi-minor axis of an ellipse is one half of the minor axis, running not from the center, halfway between and perpendicular to the line running between the foci, and to the edge of the ellipse. The minor axis is the longest line segment that runs perpendicular to the major axis.
The semi-minor axis b is related to the semi-major axis through the eccentricity and the semi-latus rectum, as follows:
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The semi-minor axis of an ellipse is the geometric mean of the maximum and minimum distances and of the ellipse from a focus — that is, of the distances from a focus to the endpoints of the major axis:
A parabola can be obtained as the limit of a sequence of ellipses where one focus is kept fixed as the other is allowed to move arbitrarily far away in one direction, keeping l fixed. Thus a and b tend to infinity, a faster than b.
Read more about this topic: Semi-minor Axis
Famous quotes containing the word ellipse:
“The ellipse is as aimless as that,
Stretching invisibly into the future so as to reappear
In our present. Its flexing is its account,
Return to the point of no return.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)