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Secant line. In geometry, a secant is a line that intersects a curve at a minimum of two distinct points. [ 1] The word secant comes from the Latin word secare, meaning to cut. [ 2] In the case of a circle, a secant intersects the circle at exactly two points. A chord is the line segment determined by the two points, that is, the interval on ...
The slope of this line is (+) (). This formula is known as the symmetric difference quotient. In this case the first-order errors cancel, so the slope of these secant lines differ from the slope of the tangent line by an amount that is approximately proportional to .
For this particular case, the secant method will not converge to the visible root. In numerical analysis, the secant method is a root-finding algorithm that uses a succession of roots of secant lines to better approximate a root of a function f. The secant method can be thought of as a finite-difference approximation of Newton's method.
An illustration of Newton's method. In numerical analysis, Newton's method, also known as the Newton–Raphson method, named after Isaac Newton and Joseph Raphson, is a root-finding algorithm which produces successively better approximations to the roots (or zeroes) of a real -valued function. The most basic version starts with a real-valued ...
The difference between two points, themselves, is known as their Delta (Δ P ), as is the difference in their function result, the particular notation being determined by the direction of formation: Backward difference: ∇F (P) = F (P) − F (P − ΔP). The general preference is the forward orientation, as F (P) is the base, to which ...
Slope illustrated for y = (3/2)x − 1.Click on to enlarge Slope of a line in coordinates system, from f(x) = −12x + 2 to f(x) = 12x + 2. The slope of a line in the plane containing the x and y axes is generally represented by the letter m, [5] and is defined as the change in the y coordinate divided by the corresponding change in the x coordinate, between two distinct points on the line.
Arc length. When rectified, the curve gives a straight line segment with the same length as the curve's arc length. Arc length s of a logarithmic spiral as a function of its parameter θ. Arc length is the distance between two points along a section of a curve . Determining the length of an irregular arc segment by approximating the arc segment ...
Specifically, they are the inverses of the sine, cosine, tangent, cotangent, secant, and cosecant functions, [ 10] and are used to obtain an angle from any of the angle's trigonometric ratios. Inverse trigonometric functions are widely used in engineering, navigation, physics, and geometry .