A hyperbola is a curve where the distances of any point from:
From the standard form: we can derive:
Dulles Airport is in the
shape of a hyperbolic paraboloid.
A household lamp casts hyperbolic shadows on a wall.
Two hyperboloids of revolution can provide gear transmission between two skew axes.
The cogs of each gear are a set of generating straight lines.
The hyperboloid is the design standard for all nuclear cooling towers. When designing these cooling towers, engineers are faced with two problems:
Open orbits of comets about the sun follow hyperbolas