Why is it a tangent?
Posted in Mathematics on April 3rd, 2007 No Comments »
While substituting for a colleague in Modern Geometry, we were reviewing several theorems regarding circles and doing some constructions with compass and ruler. At one point I presented a theorem on the fact that a tangent line to a circle is perpendicular to the line passing through the center of the circle and the point of the tangent. We also demonstrated that the converse is true: any line that passes through a point on a circle that is perpendicular to the through that point and the center must be a tangent.[...]