Chapter 2: Linear and Quadratic Functions
We now begin the study of families of functions. Our first family, linear functions, are old friends as we shall soon see. Recall from Geometry that two distinct points in the plane determine a unique line containing those points, as indicated below.
To give a sense of the `steepness' of the line, we recall that we can compute the slope of the line using the formula below.
Adapted from Precalculus, 3rd corrected edition, by Carl Stitz and Jeff Zeager (stitz-zeager.com), licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. Changes were made: reformatted as an accessible XYZ web edition. License: CC-BY-NC-SA-3.0.