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The tangent line is said to be "going in the same direction" as the curve, and is thus the best straight-line approximation to the curve at that point. The tangent line to a point on a differentiable curve can also be thought of as a tangent line approximation , the graph of the affine function that best approximates the original function at ...
k = 1 is the tangent line to the right of the circles looking from c 1 to c 2. k = −1 is the tangent line to the right of the circles looking from c 2 to c 1. The above assumes each circle has positive radius. If r 1 is positive and r 2 negative then c 1 will lie to the left of each line and c 2 to the right, and the two tangent lines will ...
In projective geometry and related contexts, an asymptote of a curve is a line which is tangent to the curve at a point at infinity. [1] [2] The word asymptote is derived from the Greek ἀσύμπτωτος (asumptōtos) which means "not falling together", from ἀ priv. + σύν "together" + πτωτ-ός "fallen". [3]
Supporting lines and tangent lines are not the same thing, [11] but for convex curves, every tangent line is a supporting line. [8] At a point of a curve where a tangent line exists, there can only be one supporting line, the tangent line. [12] Therefore, a smooth curve is convex if it lies on one side of each of its tangent lines.
[b] Even though the tangent line only touches a single point at the point of tangency, it can be approximated by a line that goes through two points. This is known as a secant line. If the two points that the secant line goes through are close together, then the secant line closely resembles the tangent line, and, as a result, its slope is also ...
Every point in the plane has at least one tangent line to γ passing through it, and so region filled by the tangent lines is the whole plane. The boundary E 3 is therefore the empty set. Indeed, consider a point in the plane, say (x 0,y 0). This point lies on a tangent line if and only if there exists a t such that
In polar coordinates, the polar tangential angle is defined as the angle between the tangent line to the curve at the given point and ray from the origin to the point. [6] If ψ denotes the polar tangential angle, then ψ = φ − θ, where φ is as above and θ is, as usual, the polar angle.
If a point P moves along a line l, its polar p rotates about the pole L of the line l. If two tangent lines can be drawn from a pole to the circle, then its polar passes through both tangent points. If a point lies on the circle, its polar is the tangent through this point. If a point P lies on its own polar line, then P is on the circle.