Well, both of you know more than I do. Atomica gave a couple of diagrams, but they didn't help me at all. The def. consisted of "A line whose distance to a given curve tends to zero." Okay-y-y...if somebody would give me an explanation starting from scratch, I would be most grateful. I have NO idea what this means! There is distance between the line and the curve, so I surmise that the line is not the curve. I am envisioning a straight line, going on for infinity, and some curve somewhere above, beside, or below it. But how do they decide from what part of the curve they want to measure this distance? The part closest to the line? I guess it would have to be pretty darned close, to be nearly zero distance. And what in the world did they mean by "tends to"?? Tends toward?
(By the way, I guess this might be taken as once-and-for-all proof that I am pretty literal-minded!)
