The surface tangent paradox and the difference vector quotient of a secant plane

Abstract

If a one-variable function is sufficiently smooth, then the limit position of secant lines its graph is a tangent line. By analogy, one would expect that the limit position of secant planes of a two-variable smooth function is a plane tangent to its graph. Amazingly, this is not necessarily true, even when the function is a simple polynomial. Despite this paradox, we show that some analogies with the one-variable case still hold in the multi-variable context, provided we use a particular vector product: the Clifford's geometric one.