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The intuitive notion that a tangent line "touches" a curve can be made more explicit by considering the sequence of straight lines (secant lines) passing through two points, A and B, those that lie on the function curve. The tangent at A is the limit when point B approximates or tends to A. The existence and uniqueness of the tangent line ...
A circle is tangent to a point if it passes through the point, and tangent to a line if they intersect at a single point P or if the line is perpendicular to a radius drawn from the circle's center to P. Circles tangent to two given points must lie on the perpendicular bisector. Circles tangent to two given lines must lie on the angle bisector.
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 ...
In analytic geometry, an asymptote (/ ˈ æ s ɪ m p t oʊ t /) of a curve is a line such that the distance between the curve and the line approaches zero as one or both of the x or y coordinates tends to infinity. In projective geometry and related contexts, an asymptote of a curve is a line which is tangent to the curve at a point at infinity ...
Monge's theorem states that the three such points given by the three pairs of circles always lie in a straight line. In the case of two of the circles being of equal size, the two external tangent lines are parallel. In this case Monge's theorem asserts that the other two intersection points must lie on a line parallel to those two external ...
More precisely, a straight line is said to be a tangent of a curve y = f(x) at a point x = c on the curve if the line passes through the point (c, f(c)) on the curve and has slope f ' (c) where f ' is the derivative of f. A similar definition applies to space curves and curves in n-dimensional Euclidean space.
Consider, for example, the one-parameter family of tangent lines to the parabola y = x 2. These are given by the generating family F(t,(x,y)) = t 2 – 2tx + y. The zero level set F(t 0,(x,y)) = 0 gives the equation of the tangent line to the parabola at the point (t 0,t 0 2).
If the tangent point is not on a pole or the equator, then the meridians are radially outward straight lines from a pole, but not equally spaced (Fig 4 below). The equator is a straight line that is perpendicular to only one meridian, indicating that the projection is not conformal. Other parallels are depicted as conic sections.