Secant line

For the secant trigonometric function, see Secant (trigonometry).

In geometry, a secant is a line that intersects a curve at a minimum of two distinct points.[1] The word secant comes from the Latin word secare, meaning to cut.[2] In the case of a circle, a secant intersects the circle at exactly two points. A chord is the line segment determined by the two points, that is, the interval on the secant whose ends are the two points.[3]

  1. ^ Protter, Murray H.; Protter, Philip E. (1988), Calculus with Analytic Geometry, Jones & Bartlett Learning, p. 62, ISBN 9780867200935.
  2. ^ Redgrove, Herbert Stanley (1913), Experimental Mensuration: An Elementary Test-book of Inductive Geometry, Van Nostrand, p. 167.
  3. ^ Gullberg, Jan (1997), Mathematics: From the Birth of Numbers, W. W. Norton & Company, p. 387, ISBN 9780393040029.