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  2. Tangent lines to circles - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangent_lines_to_circles

    A tangent line t to a circle C intersects the circle at a single point T. For comparison, secant lines intersect a circle at two points, whereas another line may not intersect a circle at all. This property of tangent lines is preserved under many geometrical transformations, such as scalings, rotation, translations, inversions, and map ...

  3. Tangent - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangent

    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 ...

  4. Tangential angle - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangential_angle

    The tangential angle φ for an arbitrary curve A in P. In geometry, the tangential angle of a curve in the Cartesian plane, at a specific point, is the angle between the tangent line to the curve at the given point and the x-axis. [1] (Some authors define the angle as the deviation from the direction of the curve at some fixed starting point.

  5. Osculating circle - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osculating_circle

    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.

  6. Envelope (mathematics) - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Envelope_(mathematics)

    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.

  7. Tangent space - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangent_space

    In mathematics, the tangent space of a manifold is a generalization of tangent lines to curves in two-dimensional space and tangent planes to surfaces in three-dimensional space in higher dimensions. In the context of physics the tangent space to a manifold at a point can be viewed as the space of possible velocities for a particle moving on ...

  8. Contact (mathematics) - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contact_(mathematics)

    An osculating curve from a given family of curves is a curve that has the highest possible order of contact with a given curve at a given point; for instance a tangent line is an osculating curve from the family of lines, and has first-order contact with the given curve; an osculating circle is an osculating curve from the family of circles ...

  9. Secant line - Wikipedia

    en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secant_line

    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.