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  2. Secant line - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secant_line

    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 ...

  3. Numerical differentiation - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_differentiation

    A simple two-point estimation is to compute the slope of a nearby secant line through the points (x, f(x)) and (x + h, f(x + h)). [1] Choosing a small number h , h represents a small change in x , and it can be either positive or negative.

  4. Secant method - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secant_method

    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.

  5. Newton's method - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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 ...

  6. Tangent lines to circles - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangent_lines_to_circles

    In Euclidean plane geometry, a tangent line to a circle is a line that touches the circle at exactly one point, never entering the circle's interior. Tangent lines to circles form the subject of several theorems, and play an important role in many geometrical constructions and proofs. Since the tangent line to a circle at a point P is ...

  7. Difference quotient - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_quotient

    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 ...

  8. Calculus - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus

    A line through two points on a curve is called a secant line, so m is the slope of the secant line between (a, f(a)) and (a + h, f(a + h)). The second line is only an approximation to the behavior of the function at the point a because it does not account for what happens between a and a + h .

  9. Derivative - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative

    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.