Cylinder (geometry) - Other Types of Cylinders

Other Types of Cylinders

An elliptic cylinder, or cylindroid, is a quadric surface, with the following equation in Cartesian coordinates:

This equation is for an elliptic cylinder, a generalization of the ordinary, circular cylinder (a = b). Even more general is the generalized cylinder: the cross-section can be any curve.

The cylinder is a degenerate quadric because at least one of the coordinates (in this case z) does not appear in the equation.

An oblique cylinder has the top and bottom surfaces displaced from one another.

There are other more unusual types of cylinders. These are the imaginary elliptic cylinders:

the hyperbolic cylinder:

and the parabolic cylinder:

Read more about this topic:  Cylinder (geometry)

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