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In mathematics, tables of trigonometric functions are useful in a number of areas. Before the existence of pocket calculators, trigonometric tables were essential for navigation, science and engineering. The calculation of mathematical tables was an important area of study, which led to the development of the first mechanical computing devices.
Terms with infinitely many sine factors would necessarily be equal to zero. When only finitely many of the angles are nonzero then only finitely many of the terms on the right side are nonzero because all but finitely many sine factors vanish. Furthermore, in each term all but finitely many of the cosine factors are unity.
In mathematics, sine and cosine are trigonometric functions of an angle.The sine and cosine of an acute angle are defined in the context of a right triangle: for the specified angle, its sine is the ratio of the length of the side opposite that angle to the length of the longest side of the triangle (the hypotenuse), and the cosine is the ratio of the length of the adjacent leg to that of the ...
The first tables of trigonometric functions known to be made were by Hipparchus (c.190 – c.120 BCE) and Menelaus (c.70–140 CE), but both have been lost. Along with the surviving table of Ptolemy (c. 90 – c.168 CE), they were all tables of chords and not of half-chords, that is, the sine function. [1]
Ptolemy used chord length to define his trigonometric functions, a minor difference from the sine convention we use today. [12] (The value we call sin(θ) can be found by looking up the chord length for twice the angle of interest (2θ) in Ptolemy's table, and then dividing that value by two.)
In the table below, the label "Undefined" represents a ratio : If the codomain of the trigonometric functions is taken to be the real numbers these entries are undefined , whereas if the codomain is taken to be the projectively extended real numbers , these entries take the value ∞ {\displaystyle \infty } (see division by zero ).
The versine or versed sine is a trigonometric function found in some of the earliest (Sanskrit Aryabhatia, [1] Section I) trigonometric tables. The versine of an angle is 1 minus its cosine . There are several related functions, most notably the coversine and haversine .
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