The Equation of a Parabola
Quadratic equations are special enough and have enough interesting properties that they're worth spening some time focusing on them. In algebra classes, you're usually just told that "the graph of a quadratic eqation is called a 'parabola' and it looks like this . . .". Then you're teacher draws something that looks like a U. In this section, we're going to start from the beginnign with a geometric definition of a parabola then we'll see how to derive the quqadratic equation that describes it.
Video Lectures
You probably already know what the equation of a parabola looks like but, in this lecture, we're going to start with a geometric description then derive the equation in a way that gives us additional information about the parabola's properties.
Now that we've got the equation, we'll see how to use it to get information about a parabola, how to come up with the equation given information and how to generalize it so that the vertex doesn't have to be at the origin.
