Where is the cone? (1708.07093v2)

Abstract: Real quadric curves are often referred to as "conic sections," implying that they can be realized as plane sections of circular cones. However, it seems that the details of this equivalence have been partially forgotten by the mathematical community. The definitive analytic treatment was given by Otto Staude in the 1880s and a non-technical description was given in the first chapter of Hilbert and Cohn-Vossen's "Geometry and the Imagination" (1932). The main theorem is elegant and easy to state but is surprisingly difficult to find in the literature. A synthetic version appears in The Universe of Conics (2016) but we still have not found a full analytic treatment written down. The goal of this note is to fill a surprising gap in the literature by advertising this beautiful theorem, and to provide the slickest possible analytic proof by using standard linear algebra that was not standard in 1932.