I got a plane with equation:
P
(
x
,
y
)
=
16100
+
Aditya Erickson
Answered question
2022-05-21
I got a plane with equation: A line (parametrized equation) which lies on the plane P:
And a point which belongs to the line: I need to find an equation of the line that belongs to the specified plane P and crosses specified line at the specified point O making an angle of with the line.
Answer & Explanation
Erzrivalef6
Beginner2022-05-22Added 10 answers
Step 1 That is not the equation of a plane. It is not really an equation at all. It is the definition of the "P(x,y)" function. An equation forces the variables in it into some relationship. If you don't count the function P as a variable, this does no such thing. From the rest of your post, it is evident that the equation of the plane is
which forces a relationship between the y and z coordinates of the points on the plane. (Since x does not appear, it can still take on any value. But specifying a value for either y or z forces a value on the other by the equation.) Solving your problem is most easily done using vector notation. You can rewrite the equation of the plane P as
Or
where is the position vector, representing points in space as vectors from the origin, and is a vector. The points of P are exactly those for which the equation holds. can be thought of as a vector now. We can verify that it is a point on the plane by calculating
You can plug this back into the equation for P as:
and rearrange to get
as an alternate form of the equation of the plane. Since and O are points on the plane, their difference is a direction along the plane. So this says that the vector n is perpendicular to all directions along the plane P. Indeed, P is the unique plane which is perpendicular to n and passes through the point O. The line is defined parametrically by the expression
where For every value of t, the point lies on the line, and for every point on the line, there is some t for which that point is . Note that if , then and , which shows that the line does lie in P. To find the lines, first find a line in the plane perpendicular to . Fortunately the cross product provides what we need. Set
Then m is perpendicular to both n and i:
So the line parametrized by lies in the plane P and is perpendicular to . i is a unit vector: . But m is not: . We need unit vectors for the next step, so divide m by its length:
Finally we can rotate i by towards or towards to get vectors pointing along the two lines. For most angles you would use trig for this, but is particularly easy:
The parametric expressions for the two lines are and