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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 construct a circle that was tangent to a given curve. He could then use the radius at the point of intersection to find the slope of a normal line, and from this one can easily find the slope of a tangent line.
An osculating circle is a circle that best approximates the curvature of a curve at a specific point. It is tangent to the curve at that point and has the same curvature as the curve at that point. [2] The osculating circle provides a way to understand the local behavior of a curve and is commonly used in differential geometry and calculus.
The line perpendicular to the tangent line to a curve at the point of tangency is called the normal line to the curve at that point. The slopes of perpendicular lines have product −1, so if the equation of the curve is y = f(x) then slope of the normal line is /
In geometry, a normal is an object (e.g. a line, ray, or vector) that is perpendicular to a given object. For example, the normal line to a plane curve at a given point is the line perpendicular to the tangent line to the curve at the point. A normal vector of length one is called a unit normal vector.
k = 1 is the tangent line to the right of the circles looking from c 1 to c 2. k = −1 is the tangent line to the right of the circles looking from c 2 to c 1. The above assumes each circle has positive radius. If r 1 is positive and r 2 negative then c 1 will lie to the left of each line and c 2 to the right, and the two tangent lines will ...
Illustration of tangential and normal components of a vector to a surface. In mathematics, given a vector at a point on a curve, that vector can be decomposed uniquely as a sum of two vectors, one tangent to the curve, called the tangential component of the vector, and another one perpendicular to the curve, called the normal component of the vector.
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 therefore contained in a unique secant line and each secant line ...
Supporting lines and tangent lines are not the same thing, [11] but for convex curves, every tangent line is a supporting line. [8] At a point of a curve where a tangent line exists, there can only be one supporting line, the tangent line. [12] Therefore, a smooth curve is convex if it lies on one side of each of its tangent lines.