The parabola in a coordinate plane can be thought of as a set of points P, with coordinates (x, y), such that the distances to a given point and a given line (that does not contain that point) are equal. The given point is called the focus and the line is called the directrix.
A u-shaped curve with certain specific properties. Formally, a parabola is defined as follows: For a given point, called the focus, and a given line not through the focus, called the directrix, a parabola is the locus of points such that the distance to the focus equals the distance to the directrix.
