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The sides of this rhombus have length 1. The angle between the horizontal line and the shown diagonal is 1 / 2 (a + b).This is a geometric way to prove the particular tangent half-angle formula that says tan 1 / 2 (a + b) = (sin a + sin b) / (cos a + cos b).
The half-angle formula for cosine can be obtained by replacing with / and taking the square-root of both sides: (/) = (+ ) /. Sine power-reduction formula: an illustrative diagram. The shaded blue and green triangles, and the red-outlined triangle E B D {\displaystyle EBD} are all right-angled and similar, and all contain the angle θ ...
For example, the sine of angle θ is defined as being the length of the opposite side divided by the length of the hypotenuse. The six trigonometric functions are defined for every real number, except, for some of them, for angles that differ from 0 by a multiple of the right angle (90°). Referring to the diagram at the right, the six ...
Repeated application of the half-angle formulas leads to nested radicals, specifically nested square roots of 2 of the form . In general, the sine and cosine of most angles of the form β / 2 n {\displaystyle \beta /2^{n}} can be expressed using nested square roots of 2 in terms of β {\displaystyle \beta } .
The tangent of half an angle is important in spherical trigonometry and was sometimes known in the 17th century as the half tangent or semi-tangent. [2] Leonhard Euler used it to evaluate the integral ∫ d x / ( a + b cos x ) {\textstyle \int dx/(a+b\cos x)} in his 1768 integral calculus textbook , [ 3 ] and Adrien-Marie Legendre described ...
The other four trigonometric functions (tan, cot, sec, csc) can be defined as quotients and reciprocals of sin and cos, except where zero occurs in the denominator. It can be proved, for real arguments, that these definitions coincide with elementary geometric definitions if the argument is regarded as an angle in radians. [ 5 ]
The formulas for addition and subtraction involving a small angle may be used for interpolating between trigonometric table values: Example: sin(0.755) = (+) + () + () where the values for sin(0.75) and cos(0.75) are obtained from trigonometric table. The result is accurate to the four digits given.
Historically, the earliest method by which trigonometric tables were computed, and probably the most common until the advent of computers, was to repeatedly apply the half-angle and angle-addition trigonometric identities starting from a known value (such as sin(π/2) = 1, cos(π/2) = 0).