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Parabolas in the Real World

Author: Graham Pardun

The Trajectory of a Cannonball, a Real Life Application of Parabolas

In this lesson, we'll get into the science of ballistics -- how things (like cannonballs) travel through the air under the influence of gravity. We'll figure out, using the graph of a quadratic equation, how far a cannonball will go if we shoot it at a certain angle and velocity, which is the kind of thing people were trying to figure out when they discovered quadratic equations in the first place!