information:highlighting, structural:expansion
Intersection at infinity

In a projective space over any division ring, but in particular over either the real or complex numbers, all non-degenerate conics are equivalent, and thus in projective geometry one speaks of "a conic" without specifying a type. That is, there is a projective transformation that will map any non-degenerate conic to any other non-degenerate conic.

The three types of conic sections will reappear in the affine plane obtained by choosing a line of the projective space to be the line at infinity. The three types are then determined by how this line at infinity intersects the conic in the projective space. In the corresponding affine space, one obtains an ellipse if the conic does not intersect the line at infinity, a parabola if the conic intersects the line at infinity in one double point corresponding to the axis, and a hyperbola if the conic intersects the line at infinity in two points corresponding to the asymptotes.