About this Gallery

In this gallery you'll find interactive pictures of the quadric surfaces. You can see what the cross sections look like, and also how various coefficients can affect the shape of the surface.

These pictures all include "sliders," as in the following two examples. The first picture shows a sphere with an adjustable radius; click and drag the blue dot to change the radius. The second picture shows the various cross sections of the sphere. Click and drag the blue dots to adjust the chosen values for x, y, and z.

You can also rotate the pictures and zoom in or out. (The pictures in the gallery are larger than the examples shown on this page.)

Note: Because of a bug in some browsers (particularly older versions of Netscape, Mozilla or Firefox), the images below sometimes fail to display properly when you first load the page. If you see technical error messages instead of pictures, click the "Reload" button on your browser.

To rotate: Click and drag
To zoom: Shift + click and drag up or down
To restore original image: Press Home key
To adjust values of parameters: Click and drag the blue dots

Once you've gotten the hang of these two examples, you're ready to view any of the gallery images.