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Common lines and line segments on a circle, including a secant. A straight line can intersect a circle at zero, one, or two points. A line with intersections at two points is called a secant line, at one point a tangent line and at no points an exterior line. A chord is the line segment that joins two distinct points of a circle. A chord is ...
a secant line, in geometry; the secant variety, in algebraic geometry; secant (trigonometry) (Latin: secans), the multiplicative inverse (or reciprocal) trigonometric function of the cosine; the secant method, a root-finding algorithm in numerical analysis, based on secant lines to graphs of functions; a secant ogive in nose cone design
Common lines and line segments on a circle, including a chord in blue. A chord (from the Latin chorda, meaning "bowstring") of a circle is a straight line segment whose endpoints both lie on a circular arc. If a chord were to be extended infinitely on both directions into a line, the object is a secant line.
As h approaches zero, the slope of the secant line approaches the slope of the tangent line. Therefore, the true derivative of f at x is the limit of the value of the difference quotient as the secant lines get closer and closer to being a tangent line: ′ = (+) ().
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 , so it is considered a quasi-Newton method .
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.
Next to the tangent-secant theorem and the intersecting secants theorem the intersecting chords theorem represents one of the three basic cases of a more general theorem about two intersecting lines and a circle - the power of point theorem.
Jensen's inequality generalizes the statement that a secant line of a convex function lies above its graph. Visualizing convexity and Jensen's inequality. In mathematics, Jensen's inequality, named after the Danish mathematician Johan Jensen, relates the value of a convex function of an integral to the integral of the convex function.