Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The geometrical idea of the tangent line as the limit of secant lines serves as the motivation for analytical methods that are used to find tangent lines explicitly. The question of finding the tangent line to a graph, or the tangent line problem, was one of the central questions leading to the development of calculus in the 17th century.
The curve was first proposed and studied by René Descartes in 1638. [1] Its claim to fame lies in an incident in the development of calculus.Descartes challenged Pierre de Fermat to find the tangent line to the curve at an arbitrary point since Fermat had recently discovered a method for finding tangent lines.
No tangent line can be drawn through a point within a circle, since any such line must be a secant line. However, two tangent lines can be drawn to a circle from a point P outside of the circle. The geometrical figure of a circle and both tangent lines likewise has a reflection symmetry about the radial axis joining P to the center point O of ...
An extremely special case of this is the following: if a differentiable function from reals to the reals has nonzero derivative at a zero of the function, then the zero is simple, i.e. it the graph is transverse to the x-axis at that zero; a zero derivative would mean a horizontal tangent to the curve, which would agree with the tangent space ...
The two circles in the Two points, one line problem where the line through P and Q is not parallel to the given line l, can be constructed with compass and straightedge by: Draw the line m through the given points P and Q. The point G is where the lines l and m intersect; Draw circle C that has PQ as diameter. Draw one of the tangents from G to ...
The name is motivated by low-dimensional examples like the trivial line bundle over a circle, which is sometimes depicted as a vertical cylinder projecting to a horizontal circle. A subspace H e E {\displaystyle H_{e}E} of T e E {\displaystyle T_{e}E} is called a horizontal space if T e E {\displaystyle T_{e}E} is the direct sum of V e E ...
The expression () gives the slope of the line joining the points (, ()) and (, ()), which is a chord of the graph of , while ′ gives the slope of the tangent to the curve at the point (, ()). Thus the mean value theorem says that given any chord of a smooth curve, we can find a point on the curve lying between the end-points of the chord such ...
The second potential problem is that even if the intersection is zero-dimensional, it may be non-transverse, for example, if V is a plane curve and W is one of its tangent lines. The first problem requires the machinery of intersection theory, discussed above in detail, which replaces V and W by more convenient subvarieties using the moving lemma.