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The table of chords, created by the Greek astronomer, geometer, and geographer Ptolemy in Egypt during the 2nd century AD, is a trigonometric table in Book I, chapter 11 of Ptolemy's Almagest, [1] a treatise on mathematical astronomy. It is essentially equivalent to a table of values of the sine function.
Ptolemy's Theorem yields as a corollary a pretty theorem [2] regarding an equilateral triangle inscribed in a circle. Given An equilateral triangle inscribed on a circle and a point on the circle. The distance from the point to the most distant vertex of the triangle is the sum of the distances from the point to the two nearer vertices.
Ptolemy used a circle of diameter 120, and gave chord lengths accurate to two sexagesimal (base sixty) digits after the integer part. [2] The chord function is defined geometrically as shown in the picture. The chord of an angle is the length of the chord between two points on a unit circle separated by that central angle.
Chord (geometry) Circle (also see List of circle topics) Unit circle; Hypotenuse; Opposites post; π (pi) Ptolemy's theorem; Pythagorean theorem; Regiomontanus' angle maximization problem; Thales' theorem; Trigonometric function; Trigonometry of a tetrahedron; Triangle (also see List of triangle topics)
In Euclidean geometry, the intersecting chords theorem, or just the chord theorem, is a statement that describes a relation of the four line segments created by two intersecting chords within a circle. It states that the products of the lengths of the line segments on each chord are equal.
A special case of Ptolemy's theorem appeared as proposition 93 in Euclid's Data. Ptolemy's theorem leads to the equivalent of the four sum-and-difference formulas for sine and cosine that are today known as Ptolemy's formulas, although Ptolemy himself used chords instead of sine and cosine. [21]
Ptolemy's theorem states that the sum of the products of the lengths of opposite sides is equal to the product of the lengths of the diagonals. When those side-lengths are expressed in terms of the sin and cos values shown in the figure above, this yields the angle sum trigonometric identity for sine: sin( α + β ) = sin α cos β + cos α sin ...
Ptolemy's Handy Tables. A collection of astronomical tables originally compiled by Ptolemy. [11] It has often been claimed in modern times that Theon edited this text. [12] However, none of the surviving manuscripts mention Theon, [13] and the evidence suggests that the surviving tables must be very similar to the tables Ptolemy provided.