Name and/or generalization? “The slope of the secant through two points of a quadratic is the average of the slopes of the tangents at those points.”

conic sectionsquadraticssecantslopetangent line

Does the following property of quadratic equations have a name? Is it generalized in some way? Or generalized to other functions?

Pick any two points on the graph of any quadratic. Draw a secant line through the points. Draw a tangent line through each of the points. The slope of the secant line will equal the arithmetic average of the slopes of two tangent lines.

I have examined the wikipedia pages for quadratics and parabolas and there seems to be a lot of similar properties but (perhaps) not exactly this one. That is why I think it must be a specific case of something more general or maybe it is so obvious that it is not mentioned. It seems to be related to the mean value theorem as well.

Best Answer

This is related to a well-known property of parabolas:

The line parallel to the axis through the midpoint of a chord $AB$, also passes through the intersection of the tangents at $A$ and $B$.

As you can see in figure below, we have then:

$$ m_{AC}=-{y_A\over x},\quad m_{BC}={y_B\over x},\quad m_{AB}={y_B-y_A\over 2x}. $$

enter image description here

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