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Thus the length of a curve is a non-negative real number. Usually no curves are considered which are partly spacelike and partly timelike. In theory of relativity, arc length of timelike curves (world lines) is the proper time elapsed along the world line, and arc length of a spacelike curve the proper distance along the curve.
The chord function can be related to the modern sine function, by taking one of the points to be (1,0), and the other point to be (cos θ, sin θ), and then using the Pythagorean theorem to calculate the chord length: [2]
In the case of a line in the plane given by the equation ax + by + c = 0, where a, b and c are real constants with a and b not both zero, the distance from the line to a point (x 0,y 0) is [1] [2]: p.14
Given the two red points, the blue line is the linear interpolant between the points, and the value y at x may be found by linear interpolation. In mathematics, linear interpolation is a method of curve fitting using linear polynomials to construct new data points within the range of a discrete set of known data points.
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.
In taxicab geometry, the distance between any two points equals the length of their shortest grid path. This different definition of distance also leads to a different definition of the length of a curve, for which a line segment between any two points has the same length as a grid path between those points rather than its Euclidean length.
An algebraic curve in the Euclidean plane is the set of the points whose coordinates are the solutions of a bivariate polynomial equation p(x, y) = 0.This equation is often called the implicit equation of the curve, in contrast to the curves that are the graph of a function defining explicitly y as a function of x.
Informally, it is a line through a pair of infinitely close points on the curve. More precisely, a straight line is said to be a tangent of a curve y = f(x) at a point x = c on the curve if the line passes through the point (c, f(c)) on the curve and has slope f ' (c) where f ' is the derivative of f.