Find equation of circle passing through intersection of circle
S
=
x
2
</ms
Dayanara Terry
Answered question
2022-07-02
Find equation of circle passing through intersection of circle
and and having radius equal to that of circle S.
Answer & Explanation
Miguidi4y
Beginner2022-07-03Added 13 answers
Step 1 Let A,B be the intersection points of S and L; in other words . Then for any t we also have , thet is passes through A and B. You seem to be asking why these are all the circles that pass through A and B. I think this is usually explained via linear algebra. Very roughly speaking, a general circle looks like , with 3 coefficients, so "the degree of freedom" is 3. If you require a circle to pass through A,B then you impose two constraints, so "there is only 1 degree of freedom left". Since our t was arbitrary, that's exactly the degree of freedom left
Frederick Kramer
Beginner2022-07-04Added 7 answers
Step 1 To begin with, I think that you copied the equation wrong with an extra ; it should be
And then the next line should be
with 20t instead of 2t. The t here is called a Lagrange multiplier (after Joseph-Louis Lagrange, although he was not the first to use them); it's often written (which I think stands for Lagrange, although I'm not sure). This is often taught in a multivariable Calculus course to find extreme values of functions of several variables under constraints; but as you can see, it has other uses. I'll continue to use t in this answer. When , we get the original circle S; but for other values of t we get other circles; and as , the circle gets closer and closer to the line L. (There are versions of this technique where you put a multiplier in front of each expression, so
so that you can recover both original curves exactly for certain values of the multipliers. But it's usually enough just to have one multiplier; and in this case, it's convenient not to have s so that you can say that every one of these curves is a circle.) Now, every one of these circles passes through the point where S intersects L. This is by design, because the equation is
so any point that is on both S and L will give
You are asked to find a circle through that point with the same radius as S, and here you have a whole family of circles through that point, so you just have to figure out the radius (as a function of t) and solve for t. Of course, one of the solutions gives you S again, so you pick the other solution. Hopefully your instructor would explain all of this, but once you get used to it, you just set up
to get a family of related curves through the points where two original curves meet, without thinking very much about it. (Your professor also used 2t instead of t, which I think was just to make it easier to complete the square when calculating the radius. I don't know any systematic reason to use 2t. But since the line is given equally well by or by , it makes no difference in the end.)