Computing the intersection of a plane and a natural quadric

Abstract

A method of computing the intersection of a plane and a natural quadric surface is presented. This problem is basic in geometric areas such as solid modeling and descriptive geometry. Our method, arising out of recent work on lower degree intersections of quadrics, computes the directions of the axes of the intersection, and then computes their lengths using the Dandelin sphere. The method also gives all parallel plane sections of the natural quadric, with no added computation.