Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Derivative of Secant Function

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The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. - brenneman 03:21, 12 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Derivative of Secant Function

Derivative of Secant Function (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)

The article Derivative of Secant Function does not seem to add any value to Wikipedia. The derivative of the secant function can be derived in one or two lines using the chain rule, the derivative of cos, and similar standard rules of calculus; it is pointless to derive it from the limit definition of differentiation (which requires much more work and is therefore only used to derive the most basic rules of differentiation).

Are we going to have an article on "Derivative of X" for all X using this pointlessly cumbersome machinery? Possible? Yes (given infinite time). Useful? No.

(I should mention that the proof is also incomplete. It relies on the fact that sin(x)/x goes to 1 as x goes to zero, but needs to also show that (1-cos(x))/x goes to zero.)

—Steven G. Johnson 21:06, 6 January 2007 (UTC)

  • Delete Wikipedia is not a calculus textbook. Pascal.Tesson 00:29, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete per nom. Paul August ☎ 07:12, 7 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete per nom. Possibly transwiki to wikibooks. --Salix alba (talk) 12:34, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
  • Delete per Pascal.Tesson. WMMartin 18:50, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
No transwiki, btw, per nom's comments on the chain rule. WMMartin 18:51, 11 January 2007 (UTC)
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.