What are ellipses?

Ellipses are oval shapes that look like stretched-out circles.

Imagine you're drawing with a friend. You both hold strings attached to two pins on a piece of paper and use a pencil to draw around them. The shape you make is an ellipse, it's like a circle that got squished from the sides.

Think of an ellipse as a special kind of path. If you were to run around an oval track, your path would be an ellipse. It has two important points called foci (like "focus" but plural). These are like two invisible friends who help shape the ellipse, when you're drawing it with strings, they’re the pins holding the string in place.

You might see ellipses every day! For example, if you look at a plate that's been pushed from the sides, it might become an ellipse. Or think of Earth’s orbit around the Sun, it's not a perfect circle but an ellipse, just like your oval track.

Ellipses are all around us, and they're pretty simple once you see how they work!