MATH 2A Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Tangent
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Math 2a - lecture 6 - tangent line problem & velocity problem. Suppose that we have a curve like y=x and we want to know the slope of the tangent line at point p(1,1). The problem is that in order to calculate the slope of a line, we need to have at least 2 points in the plane but right now we only have one (point p(1,1)). Now the slope of mp q y y2. Since there is no way the find the slope of the tangent line here we use a trick. We say i find another point on the graph of f(x)=x and call this point q. Then i find a line that passes through points p&q and if q is close to p (very close) i can approximate the new pq line as the tangent line. If i pick different values for q (its x value) the slope will be as the following: x.
