From the course: Complete Guide to Calculus Foundations for Data Science
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Tangent lines, velocity, and area
From the course: Complete Guide to Calculus Foundations for Data Science
Tangent lines, velocity, and area
- Ready to dive into the first major topic of calculus? Then let's tackle limits. In this chapter, you will define one and two-sided limits, discover limit properties, and learn about infinite limits. Before moving on though, let's first explore the topics of tangent lines, velocity, and area. Let's start off by exploring what a tangent line is. A tangent line is a line that touches the curve of a function at a point and has the same slope of the function at that point. This tangent line helps represent the rate of change of that function at that particular point. This graph shows you what a tangent line looks like. So you have the blue curve, which is like an upside-down U, and then that red flat line on top is the tangent line because it is right up against that curve and it is equal to the slope at that particular point of the curve. Before calculus came around, it was difficult to determine the rate of change of a curve at a particular point due to many functions having…
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