How are tangents to a circle/curve applied in everyday life?

Question

How are tangents useful? I mean tangents in the geometric, not trigonometric sense.

Answer 1

I build infrastructure. Roads, Sidewalks, pipe runs, everything but the house. It is very important to know where a point of tangent begins and the curve ends. For example, I can lay out a sidewalk form in tangent with a string. At the point of curvature (pc) I would hook the end of a tape to a stake at my radius and curve my form until reaching a point of tangent(pt).

Answer 2

Every time you want to know the speed of change of one magnitude in relation to another one, that's is the derivative.
Derivative is geometrically the slope of the tangent at a point on the curve.

Answer 3

I wish I was a female's derivative so I could lie tangent to her curves!

Tangents to a curve are used in physics to find instantaneous velocity at a point

Answer 4

Try figuring out how long a belt you need to couple a pair of pulleys without using tangents! You also need to find the tangent line to join one curve smoothly to another curve without producing a kink where the curves join. Useful for designers, draftsmen, and sculptors.

Answer 5

Maybe not what you are looking for, but...
Conversations can go off on tangents, connected to topic A then going off until someone notices the are not on topic A.

Answer 6

I haven't seen anyone use it for anything so far, but I've used it for proving few mathematical concepts, all of which are for angles...

Being able to prove those concepts gives us more to use upon in society. Maybe they used it to find angles also if they didn't have a protractor 0.o.

And yea, if you're talking about calculus.

It's used to maximize profit, if you know the function lol.

Acceleration, velocity, gravity are all forms of derivatives and second derivatives.

Answer 7

When you set up your jointer in your woodworking shop, the outfeed table has to be tangent to the cutter head.