In geometry, the tangent line (or simply tangent) to a plane curve at a given point is the straight line that "just touches" the curve at that point. Leibniz defined it as the line through a pair of infinitely close points on the curve. More precisely, a straight line is said to be a tangent of a curve y = f(x) at a point x = c 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.
As it passes through the point where the tangent line and the curve meet, called the point of tangency, the tangent line is "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 given point.
Similarly, the tangent plane to a surface at a given point is the plane that "just touches" the surface at that point. The concept of a tangent is one of the most fundamental notions in differential geometry and has been extensively generalized; .
The word "tangent" comes from the Latin tangere, "to touch".
Euclid makes several references to the tangent (ἐφαπτομένη ephaptoménē) to a circle in book III of the Elements (c. 300 BC). In Apollonius' work Conics (c. 225 BC) he defines a tangent as being a line such that no other straight line could
fall between it and the curve.
Archimedes (c. 287 – c. 212 BC) found the tangent to an Archimedean spiral by considering the path of a point moving along the curve.
In the 1630s Fermat developed the technique of adequality to calculate tangents and other problems in analysis and used this to calculate tangents to the parabola. The technique of adequality is similar to taking the difference between and and dividing by a power of . Independently Descartes used his method of normals based on the observation that the radius of a circle is always normal to the circle itself.
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.
This course is an introduction to the theory of Riemann surfaces. Riemann surfaces naturally appear is mathematics in many different ways: as a result of analytic continuation, as quotients of complex
Learn to optimize on smooth, nonlinear spaces: Join us to build your foundations (starting at "what is a manifold?") and confidently implement your first algorithm (Riemannian gradient descent).
Ce cours donne les connaissances fondamentales liées aux fonctions trigonométriques, logarithmiques et exponentielles. La présentation des concepts et des propositions est soutenue par une grande gamm
Ce cours donne les connaissances fondamentales liées aux fonctions trigonométriques, logarithmiques et exponentielles. La présentation des concepts et des propositions est soutenue par une grande gamm
In mathematics, a curve (also called a curved line in older texts) is an object similar to a line, but that does not have to be straight. Intuitively, a curve may be thought of as the trace left by a moving point. This is the definition that appeared more than 2000 years ago in Euclid's Elements: "The [curved] line is [...] the first species of quantity, which has only one dimension, namely length, without any width nor depth, and is nothing else than the flow or run of the point which [...
In mathematics, the mean value theorem (or Lagrange theorem) states, roughly, that for a given planar arc between two endpoints, there is at least one point at which the tangent to the arc is parallel to the secant through its endpoints. It is one of the most important results in real analysis. This theorem is used to prove statements about a function on an interval starting from local hypotheses about derivatives at points of the interval.
In mathematics, the slope or gradient of a line is a number that describes both the direction and the steepness of the line. Slope is often denoted by the letter m; there is no clear answer to the question why the letter m is used for slope, but its earliest use in English appears in O'Brien (1844) who wrote the equation of a straight line as and it can also be found in Todhunter (1888) who wrote it as "y = mx + c". Slope is calculated by finding the ratio of the "vertical change" to the "horizontal change" between (any) two distinct points on a line.
A novel surrogate model based on the Grassmannian diffusion maps (GDMaps) and utilizing geometric harmonics (GH) is developed for predicting the response of complex physical phenomena. The method utilizes GDMaps to obtain a low-dimensional representation o ...
We introduce an algorithm to reconstruct a mesh from discrete samples of a shape's Signed Distance Function (SDF). A simple geometric reinterpretation of the SDF lets us formulate the problem through a point cloud, from which a surface can be extracted wit ...
Controlling complex tasks in robotic systems, such as circular motion for cleaning or following curvy lines, can be dealt with using nonlinear vector fields. This article introduces a novel approach called the rotational obstacle avoidance method (ROAM) fo ...