Talk:Tangent

Triangles?

WOW! How lame!! The first exposure I had (and I believe most have) to tangent is with respect to triangles. Nowhere to be found, here. What a bunch of rubbish. I fail to see any excuse. I went to the disambiguation page and found no resolution. Miserable. Please consider a more gentle approach that includes the current pedagogical evolution of the term you are writing on. No lame excuses that you refer people to geometry. Oh wait, geometry is a separate branch of mathematics, is it? rolf. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.40.241.207 (talk) 22:35, 15 February 2009 (UTC)

For above you're thinking of a Tangent function: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangent_function#Tangent —Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.30.191.160 (talk) 08:10, 15 March 2009 (UTC)

The desinition of "tangent line" is incorrect. Who will replace it?
S.

Certainly the original was grotesquely incorrect. But the present one is distinctly inferior to the one that Axel Boldt wrote earlier. I fear that any good account of the matter will have to make clear not only a correct definition, but also why some of the inferior characterizations are inferior. Michael Hardy 18:30 28 May 2003 (UTC)

With the addition of the "vertical tangent" comment, this article's silliness continues. "Tangent" should first be defined in a context in which "slope" makes no sense, and only later set in the narrower context that refers to slopes. Unfortunately, I think this is being written by people whose knowledge of the subject comes only from calculus courses. Michael Hardy 20:06 3 Jun 2003 (UTC)

And now I've reverted. It makes no sense to speak of slope except when there is a coordinate system, but "tangent" makes sense regardless of the choice of coordinate system. Admittedly, the article has room for improvement, but at least the silliness of writing about slope outside of the context of a choice of coordinate system has been expunged. Probably something about that, in its proper context, should be added. Michael Hardy 21:35 3 Jun 2003 (UTC)]

I should think you should either take the time to re-write the offending "silliness" or leave it there for somebody else to fix. Pizza Puzzle

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Would User:Michael Hardy explain why he chose to delete:

• In mathematics, the word tangent has two distinct, but etymologically related meanings: one in geometry, and one in trigonometry.

Pizza Puzzle

Related meaning

To "go off on a tangent" means to go off topic, likely derived from the geometric meaning of a tangent.

I removed this piece of folk etymology because Wikipedia is not a dictionary.
—Herbee 21:10, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

Redirect to Trig function?

Should this page be redirected to the trigonometric function page just like the sine and cosine pages?

Sure it should be redirected. Both meanings are placed on one page just because the name is identical. In many languages (eg. in Polish) there are two different words, not relating each other. It came from Latin: "tango" means "to touch". If we continue such practices, someone will eventually place here information about tango dance... 83.23.193.214 11:12, 7 September 2005 (UTC)

I think "tango" means "I touch" and "tangere" means "to touch". Michael Hardy 21:12, 7 September 2005 (UTC)

I concur, tangere means to touch, and is a form of the verb tango.

The quality of this article has grown progressively worse. Also note that semicolons are not commas.

Tangent Line Problem

Um, I noticed that there was not an article nor a redirect at Tangent line problem, so I created a redirect to here from there. Seeing as how this article is most relevant. I was kind of surprised there was no article about that particular problem... --Comrade^4·2 02:59, 12 September 2006 (UTC)

More confusing redirects

There is also a redirect from "tangent problem", as in "Gottfried Leibniz gave a complete solution to the tangent problem.". There is no clear explanation on this page of why this redirects here, what it refers to, or what Leibniz did. 68.236.190.79 (talk) 23:14, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

Quotation

"And I dare say that this is not only the most useful and general [concept] in geometry, that I know, but even that I ever desire to know." Descartes (1637)"

this sentence makes no actual sense --212.219.116.214 16:05, 2 October 2006 (UTC)

• This quote should be removed until it can be verified. I can't find it elsewhere on the internet. Can whoever added provide a reference? It's also grammatically incorrect, no? Tnek46 16:42, 9 October 2006 (UTC)

I tried to find the original (French or latin) citation but couldn't find it. If someone finds it, I might be able to make a better translation--Yitscar (talk) 10:20, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

A facsimile of the original French is in ISBN 0486600688, but I can't get it online, and I couldn't translate it anyway. I added two cites to the translated quote. Tom Harrison ^Talk 13:35, 20 November 2007 (UTC)

Sections

Shouldn't the section derivative, integral, and power series be subsections of the trigonometry sections since they refer to that particular concept? Ricardo sandoval 20:44, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

No, whereas they can be interpreted to be somehow related to tangent lines, it is mostly related to limits.--A 22:58, 26 October 2007 (UTC)

Divorce

I have removed the obsolete section about the trigonometric function tangent — the topic is much better covered at the trigonometric functions and doesn't have much in common with the tangents in geometry. This was discussed at WT:WPM and didn't raise objections. Unfortunately, no one came forward willing to fix the incoming links (a program like AWB should make it a very straighforward even if tedious task), so I'd like to repeat the request here.

The article requires major expansion, it presently contains little beyond the definition and a description of the approach to tangent lines based on calculus. Arcfrk (talk) 05:50, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

...and that definition as as muddly as the vast majority of Wikipedia math. The section that describes the derivative-based equation of some aspect of a tangent line on a Cartesian plane first applies the constraint that x = a, and then states the equation as follows (not neglecting the smörgåsbord of different ways to denote a derivative in mathematical notation):

$y=f(a)+f'(a)(x-a)\,$

Given x = a, this simplifies to:

$y=f(a)\,$

Perhaps, as all Wikipedia mathematicians, the original author was speaking figuratively when s/he wrote x = a. 98.31.14.215 (talk) 10:47, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

Merge with page

The page about local linearity is the same topic. Please discuss at Talk:Local_linearity#Merge

Derivative motivation sections

I'd like to remove the sections 'Intuitive description', 'More rigorous description' and 'How the method can fail' from the article and replace them with a short summary and a link to derivative. We already have a description of how the tangent line is used to motivate definition of the derivative in that article and we don't need a redundant explanation here. The material in these sections is mostly about the definition of the derivative and so is off topic for this article. I would have proposed merging the material into the other article but that article's treatment is already fairly complete.--RDBury (talk) 07:00, 19 September 2010 (UTC)