Plane Curve
A plane curve is a curve that lies in a single plane. A plane curve may be closed or open.
Plane curve is a high school-level concept that would be first encountered in a pre-calculus course.
Examples
Circle: | A circle is the set of points in a plane that are equidistant from a given center point. |
Ellipse: | A conic section with eccentricity less than one. It resembles a squashed circle. |
Elliptic Curve: | An elliptic curve is curve defined by an irreducible cubic polynomial in two variables. |
Hyperbola: | A hyperbola is a conic section with eccentricity greater than one and consists of two separate branches. |
Parabola: | A parabola is a conic section with eccentricity equal to one. Parabolas appear as the graphs of quadratic equations and the trajectories of projectiles. |
Prerequisites
Curve: | A curve is a continuous map from a one-dimensional space to an n-dimensional space. Loosely speaking, the word "curve" is often used to mean the function graph of a two- or three-dimensional curve. |
Plane: | A plane is a two-dimensional surface defined by linear equations. |