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. | 
Classroom Articles on Pre-Calculus (Up to High School Level)