Question

tangents definition

Answer 1

a straight line or plane that touches a curve or curved surface at a point, but if extended does not cross it at that point.

Answer 2

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 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.