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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 ...
Secant is a term in mathematics derived from the Latin secare ("to cut"). It may refer to: 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
This is known as a secant line. If the two points that the secant line goes through are close together, then the secant line closely resembles the tangent line, and, as a result, its slope is also very similar: The dotted line goes through the points (,) and (,), which both lie on the curve =. Because these two points are fairly close together ...
is the slope of a secant line to the curve. For a line, the secant between any two points is the line itself, but this is not the case for any other type of curve. For example, the slope of the secant intersecting y = x 2 at (0,0) and (3,9) is 3. (The slope of the tangent at x = 3 ⁄ 2 is also 3 − a consequence of the mean value theorem.)
The red curve shows the function f, and the blue lines are the secants. For this particular case, the secant method will not converge to the visible root. 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.
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: ′ = (+) ().
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.
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.