[Simple]Coordinate geometry in the x y plane(researching)
Created | Updated Dec 23, 2004
Coordinates?????
Oh come on, you must know what coordinates are, they're those little points on a cartesian grid, and you write them like this(x,y) eg(2,1) x represents the horizontal axis and y the vertical axis and in coordinate notation x is always written before y.1
(X,Y) plane???
Do I have to go through the whole title with you? Well the x,y plane is two dimensional but of course you could have a 3 dimensional coordinates(x,y,z) and if you wanted you could express the velocity of particles making six dimensional2 coordinates. But I shouldn't go too far into that because you'll end up with all sorts of nastyuncertainty principles and scary sounding quantum mechanics and probablities and those horribly complicated theorems. 3
Also famously space-time is four dimensional, time being the fourth dimension, although why time should have one dimension and space have 3 noone can explain.4
Anyway, the x,y plane is the one you should be familiar to seeing on graphs, you know up and across axes, perfect for coordinates5(is this section really necessary, somehow I doubt it).
Entry Outline
Sorry for that silliness at the beginning and you'll probably tell I'm starting off slowly but I promise to start accelerating v.soon if you think you're above all of this, please stay on, you never know, it is possible you could learn something. However if you choose to leave right now then I won't hold it against you.
- I'll start with types of lines and curves and the equations that represent them
- Some basic definitions
- Gradients
- Some useful equations
Straight Lines and Curves
Any straight line (in the x,y plane) can be represented by the equation
y=mx+c,
where y=how high up the y axis a point is,
m= the gradient of the line
x=how far along the x axis a point is,
c=the intercept
