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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.
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 ...
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 ...
This section is an excerpt from Tangent vector. [ edit] In mathematics, a tangent vector is a vector that is tangent to a curve or surface at a given point. Tangent vectors are described in the differential geometry of curves in the context of curves in R n. More generally, tangent vectors are elements of a tangent space of a differentiable ...
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 ...
v. t. e. In mathematics, the derivative is a fundamental tool that quantifies the sensitivity of change of a function 's output with respect to its input. The derivative of a function of a single variable at a chosen input value, when it exists, is the slope of the tangent line to the graph of the function at that point.