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The curve was first proposed and studied by René Descartes in 1638. [1] Its claim to fame lies in an incident in the development of calculus.Descartes challenged Pierre de Fermat to find the tangent line to the curve at an arbitrary point since Fermat had recently discovered a method for finding tangent lines.
However, the implicit function theorem gives conditions under which an implicit curve locally is given by the graph of a function (so in particular it has no self-intersections). If the defining relations are sufficiently smooth then, in such regions, implicit curves have well defined slopes, tangent lines, normal vectors, and curvature.
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 the ...
A cardioid is the inverse curve of a parabola with its focus at the center of inversion (see graph) For the example shown in the graph the generator circles have radius a = 1 2 {\textstyle a={\frac {1}{2}}} .
The curve itself is the curve that is tangent to all of its own tangent lines. It follows that = {(,): =} . Finally we calculate E 3. 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.
In geometry, the tangent line (or simply tangent) to a plane curve at a given point is the straight line that "just touches" the curve at that point. 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 ...
In calculus, the method of normals was a technique invented by Descartes for finding normal and tangent lines to curves. It represented one of the earliest methods for constructing tangents to curves. The method hinges on the observation that the radius of a circle is always normal to the circle itself. With this in mind Descartes would ...
A bitangent differs from a secant line in that a secant line may cross the curve at the two points it intersects it. One can also consider bitangents that are not lines; for instance, the symmetry set of a curve is the locus of centers of circles that are tangent to the curve in two points.