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The word line may also refer, in everyday life, to a line segment, which is a part of a line delimited by two points (its endpoints). Euclid's Elements defines a straight line as a "breadthless length" that "lies evenly with respect to the points on itself", and introduced several postulates as basic unprovable properties on which the rest of ...
Slope: = = In mathematics, the slope or gradient of a line is a number that describes the direction of the line on a plane. [1] Often denoted by the letter m, slope is calculated as the ratio of the vertical change to the horizontal change ("rise over run") between two distinct points on the line, giving the same number for any choice of points.
is the generalized number that is added to the real line to form the projectively extended real line. c {\displaystyle {\mathfrak {c}}} ( fraktur 𝔠) c {\displaystyle {\mathfrak {c}}} denotes the cardinality of the continuum , which is the cardinality of the set of real numbers .
A closed line segment includes both endpoints, while an open line segment excludes both endpoints; a half-open line segment includes exactly one of the endpoints. In geometry , a line segment is often denoted using an overline ( vinculum ) above the symbols for the two endpoints, such as in AB .
Line a is a great circle, the equivalent of a straight line in spherical geometry. Line c is equidistant to line a but is not a great circle. It is a parallel of latitude. Line b is another geodesic which intersects a in two antipodal points. They share two common perpendiculars (one shown in blue).
The secant lines PQ are the approximations to the tangent line. In calculus, this idea is the geometric definition of the derivative. The tangent line at point P is a secant line of the curve. A tangent line to a curve at a point P may be a secant line to that curve if it intersects the curve in at least one point other than P.
Two intersecting lines. In Euclidean geometry, the intersection of a line and a line can be the empty set, a point, or another line.Distinguishing these cases and finding the intersection have uses, for example, in computer graphics, motion planning, and collision detection.
The phrase "linear equation" takes its origin in this correspondence between lines and equations: a linear equation in two variables is an equation whose solutions form a line. If b ≠ 0 , the line is the graph of the function of x that has been defined in the preceding section.