Monthly Archives: October 2012

What Makes Ellipses… Ellipses?

Last time we used wild properties of ellipses to build some really easy—and some really devilish—golf courses. Specifically, I claimed that every ellipse has two magical points F1 and F2 (called foci) such that a ray from F1 always bounces off the ellipse and lands precisely at F2, and furthermore, this path always has the same length. Why does this happen? And how do we find these foci?

Let’s focus(!) on the last question first. Recall that an ellipse is a stretched circle. In other words, an ellipse is what forms when you slice a tall, circular tube (cylinder) along a slant:

Ellipses from Slicing Tubes
Left: An ellipse is formed by slicing a cylinder. Right: Fitting spheres above and below the cut locates the ellipse’s foci.

Take a sphere that snugly fits inside the tube, and drop it down until it touches the ellipse-slice at a single point F1. Do the same with a sphere underneath, touching the slice at F2. These points turn out to be the foci of the ellipse. Let’s see why.

We can use this tubular setup to answer one mystery from earlier: for any point X on the ellipse, the sum of distances of XF1 and XF2 is always the same! The proof lies in the following animation. Segments XF1 and XA have the same length because they’re both tangent to the upper sphere from X, and similarly, XF2=XB. So the sum XF1+XF2 is just the length of segment AB, the height between the spheres’ equators.

A Proof of Ellipse Path Lengths
The sum F1X+XF2 equals the length of AB and therefore does not change when X moves.

This has two neat consequences. First, it provides an elementary method for drawing ellipses (in real life!): all you need are two push pins and a loop of string, as illustrated below. The string ensures that the sum XF1+XF2 stays fixed while you trace the pen around, as long as you’re careful to keep the string taut throughout.

Drawing an Ellipse with String
How to draw an ellipse with push-pins and string

Second, what happens if we slice a cone instead of a cylinder? Perhaps surprisingly, we still get an ellipse! Indeed, as above, we can create a sphere on either side of the slice that snugly fits against the slice and the walls of the cone (the so-called Dandelin spheres), and exactly the same proof shows that XF1+XF2 stays constant as X moves around the edge.

Ellipses from Slicing Cones
Slicing a cone also produces an ellipse, by the same argument.

But wait, there’s still an unanswered question! We’ve seen that the path F1X+XF2 has a fixed length, but why does light bounce off an ellipse along such a path? This is what we really cared about for mini-golf! Come back next time for the answer, and in the meantime, have a great 2 weeks.