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Read your shell's man page on command substitution.
Read the awk man page. It's a very powerful pattern scanning and text processing language.

You could use shell arithmetics, but this is quite limited on some shells. On others, yes, you can.

No - your mixing up shell and awk, a program.
pointsb is a shell variable. The `...` is the old, deprecated form of command substitution. awk is the program being called, the -v...s are...

pointsb will hold all the x-y coordinates of this inverse parabola, as printed out by print x,y, separated by <newline> chars.