Gardener's ellipse | nails and string method of drawing

Gardener's ellipse | nails and string method of drawing

There are several ways to define an ellipse. If you want to write software draw an ellipse, it’s most convenient to have a parametric form: This gives an ellipse centered at (h, k), with semi-major axis a, semi-minor axis b, and with the major axis rotated by an angle θ from horizontal. But if you’re going to physically draw an ellipse, there’s a more convenient definition: an ellipse is the set of points such that the sum of the distances to tw…