Thread: Stupid Question:

  1. #16
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    sine and cosine are really vector components

    You can make totally sweet graphs with sine and cosine. Im in calculus, and for one of my portfolio questions (we come up with them to demonstrate concepts) I invented a related rates problem which used sine and cosine a ton. One of them was a hyper rectangle(4D rectangle), and each dimension was going in varying sine and cosine curves with respect to time, and I calculated the instantaneous rate of change of the diagonal of the hyper rectangle, and the content (4D volume) of the rectangle at several instances.

    I also had one that was a sine wave that was bounded by a circle (so it looked like a normal sin(x) graph, except that it looped back onto itself in parametric mode), and I calculated where a particle landed, and I found the instantaneous force of gravity down at the point it landed by calculating the angle of the incline at the instant the particle landed, and because slope is y/x I just used inverse tangent of the slope at the instant the particle landed to get the angle of incline. oh yeah i also gave the particle a certain mass.

    so yeah all of the trig functions have a ton of totally sweet uses and im a nerd and i don't get laid very often

  2. #17
    Toaster Zach L.'s Avatar
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    Additionally anything to do with waves (almost) invariably uses sine and cosine. And Fourier series (sums of sines and cosines) have applications in almost everything (solutions to PDEs, signal processing, etc).

  3. #18
    Cheesy Poofs! PJYelton's Avatar
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    Also, my Circuits class uses sines, cosines, and tangents a LOT to analyze steady state circuits.

  4. #19
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    does anybody know how they actually implemented the sine and cosine functions?

  5. #20
    'AlHamdulillah
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    Sine first appeared in the work of Aryabhata, a Hindu. He used the word jya for sine. He also published the first sine tables. Brahmagupta, in 628, also published a table of sines for any angle. Jya became jiba in translation and jiba became jaib in later writings. Jaib means fold in Arabic. This was translated into sinus, or fold in Latin. In 1533, Regiomontanus’ published De triangulis omnimodis which dealt with planar trigonometry and inverses. Later, Rheticus published Copernicus’ book dealing with Trigonometry in Astronomy in 1542. Edmund Gunter first used the abbreviation sin in 1624. Sin was first used in a book in 1634. Other variances still were popular. Other variances for cosine and tangent were also still very popular, especially among different languages. Although sine, cosine, and tangent were used very much by astronomers and surveyors, the functions secant and cosecant were of little use to these practical minded mathematicians.
    http://members.aol.com/bbyars1/trig.html


    doesnt really give the answer how though
    Last edited by EvBladeRunnervE; 03-09-2004 at 11:26 AM.

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