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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).
A formula for computing the trigonometric identities for the one-third angle exists, but it requires finding the zeroes of the cubic equation 4x 3 − 3x + d = 0, where is the value of the cosine function at the one-third angle and d is the known value of the cosine function at the full angle.
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 ]
Similar right triangles illustrating the tangent and secant trigonometric functions Trigonometric functions and their reciprocals on the unit circle. The Pythagorean theorem applied to the blue triangle shows the identity 1 + cot 2 θ = csc 2 θ, and applied to the red triangle shows that 1 + tan 2 θ = sec 2 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 } .
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).