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How do owls use parabolas for the hunt?

Dr. Hakan Oztunc
9 min readJan 16, 2021

Telescopes use the parabolas for hunting (!) stars.

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Photo by Kevin Mueller on Unsplash

Owls have been a symbol of wisdom and magic throughout history in ancient Greece, Asia, and America. For instance, Athena, Athens’ patron goddess and the goddess of wisdom, had an owl as a symbol. On the other hand, owls are magical creatures most often used for delivering post and parcels in Harry Potter’s wizard world. In my opinion, they are also unquestionably gorgeous and mysterious. However, their mystery comes from the math that uses it during the hunt. Owls can use the parabolic system to find the location of their prey.

Photo by Mason Kimbarovsky on Unsplash

Parabolas can be seen everywhere, in nature, as well as in human-made monuments. A parabola is a stretched U-shaped geometric form. It can be made by cross-sectioning a cone. Menaechmus (born 380 BC), a Greek mathematician and friend of Plato, is credited with discovering the conic sections. Menaechmus’s credit for finding out that the ellipse, parabola, and hyperbola are sections of a cone — produced by the intersection of a plane with the surface of a cone — derives from an epigram of Eratosthenes…

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Dr. Hakan Oztunc
Dr. Hakan Oztunc

Written by Dr. Hakan Oztunc

Statistics Professor, Math Lover, Teaching @UOFT. Author of numerous Math Novels. Always looking to make math fun for everyone. MyBook: https://amzn.to/2M5F5Nz

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