Ellipses
The Statuary Hall is located in the US Capitol building. It is the second hall for the House of Representatives, and contains many pieces of art. Some of which include the Statue of Freedom, and Carlo Franzoni's 1810 sculptural clock. It is moslty now used to display statues.
Its elliptical shapes is very unique in the acoustical sense, because if someone is talking at one foci and you are standing at the other, you can clearly hear what is being said at the other foci. There have been a few rooms built like this, and they are known as whispering rooms.
People have always studied the stars and other celestial objects like the sun. From Earth, the sun rises in the morning in the east and moves across the sky during the day. It sets at night in the west. The stars too look like they are traveling across the sky, so early Greek astronomers believed that the earth was the center of the universe. They were proved wrong by Galileo, though, and his idea was expaned on even by a german astronomer by the name of Johannes Kepler.
In the 17th century, Kepler discovered that the planets revolved around the sun not in a circle, as was previously belived, but in a ellipse. One of the ellipse's foci was actually the sun. THis also means that at a certain part of the year the Earth is closer to the sun then at the other.
