Most Anishinaabe arcs are close to a parabola. A beam of wood will naturally form a parabola when you bring the ends closer together. Parabolas are very common in nature. For example when you toss a ball, its path of flight is a parabola. When you use a drinking fountain, you are drinking from a parabola!

In mathematics a parabola can be defined as the intersection of a plane with a cone. If we tilt the plane far enough it becomes a circle, so there is a wide range of possible curves.

In our simulation we will control the parabola shape using width and height. Width is the distance between each endpoint.