Secant is a term in mathematics derived from the
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...
''secare'' ("to cut"). It may refer to:
* a
secant line, in geometry
* the
secant variety In algebraic geometry, the secant variety \operatorname(V), or the variety of chords, of a projective variety V \subset \mathbb^r is the Zariski closure of the union of all secant lines (chords) to ''V'' in \mathbb^r:
:\operatorname(V) = \bigcup_ ...
, in algebraic geometry
*
secant (trigonometry) (Latin: secans), the multiplicative inverse (or reciprocal) trigonometric function of the cosine
* the
secant method
In numerical analysis, the secant method is a root-finding algorithm that uses a succession of roots of secant lines to better approximate a root of a function ''f''. The secant method can be thought of as a finite-difference approximation o ...
, a root-finding algorithm in numerical analysis, based on secant lines to graphs of functions
* a
secant ogive in nose cone design
{{mathdab
sr:Секанс