So in a recent video, we learned all about tangent lines, and how to calculate the slope of a tangent line using this equation. Now recall that this is just a line that touches the curve of your function at exactly one point; that's what a tangent line is. In this video, we're going to learn how to solve some other problems associated with tangent lines, specifically finding their equations. If this sounds scary, don't sweat it because the process for doing this is related to concepts that we've already learned up to this point. So without further ado, let's just jump right into an example to see what these kinds of problems look like.
So here, we're asked to find the equation of the line tangent to this function, f of x is equal to 3x2 - 4 at x is equal to negative 2. So how can we go about solving this? Well, first, I'm going to plug our x value of interest, which we call c, discussed in the previous video, into our function f(x) to get our y value f(c). Our c value is negative 2, so what we need to do is figure out what f(c) is, which is going to be f(-2).
And f(-2), while plugging it into this function, will have 3 times (-2)2 - 4. Now 3 times (-2)2 turns out to be 12, and 12 minus 4 is 8. So we end up with 8 for our f(c) value. Now that we found c and f(c), we can move on to step 2, which is plugging things into this equation for the slope of the tangent line. We already know that c here is negative 2, so this is going to stay consistent for this limit.
For the rest of the equation, we need to plug our function in for f(x). F(x) is 3x2 - 4. This whole thing is going to be minus f(c), which we just calculated to be 8, and all of this will be divided by x - c, which is the same thing as x - (-2) or x + 2.
Now, I'm going to simplify what we have on top, since I can see I can take this negative 4 and subtract 8, giving me negative 12, so we're going to have 3x2 - 12 all over x + 2. Now, I'm going to try applying my limit by pulling negative 2 in for x. But I notice that if I do that, I'm going to end up with zero in the denominator, which is not allowed.
So we're going to need to find another strategy here to evaluate this limit. I'll take the 3 and factor it out, leaving x2 - 4 divided by x + 2. But x2 - 4 can be written as (x - 2)(x + 2) all divided by x + 2. The x + 2 terms will cancel out, leaving 3(x - 2).
Now the denominator issue is resolved, and plugging negative 2 in for x results in 3 * (-2 - 2). Negative 2 - 2 is negative 4, and 3 times negative 4 is negative 12. That is the slope of the tangent line. We have factorized and canceled terms, which is common for these limits. Now we need to establish the equation of our tangent line using our x and y values and the slope in point-slope form.
The strategy for solving these problems involves calculating the slope and then plugging everything into point-slope form to get your equation. So here's how you do it: y - our y value (8) equals our slope (-12) times (x - our x value, which is negative 2, or x + 2). Distributing the -12 into the parentheses results in -12x - 24. Adding 8 to both sides cancels out the left and simplifies to y = -12x - 16 as the equation of the tangent line.
Hope you found this video helpful, and let's try getting some more practice with this.