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In trigonometry, the law of sines, sine law, sine formula, or sine rule is an equation relating the lengths of the sides of any triangle to the sines of its angles. According to the law, = = =, where a, b, and c are the lengths of the sides of a triangle, and α, β, and γ are the opposite angles (see figure 2), while R is the radius of the triangle's circumcircle.
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 that is 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 ...
Spherical trigonometry is the branch of spherical geometry that deals with the metrical relationships between the sides and angles of spherical triangles, traditionally expressed using trigonometric functions. On the sphere, geodesics are great circles. Spherical trigonometry is of great importance for calculations in astronomy, geodesy, and ...
The sine and tangent small-angle approximations are used in relation to the double-slit experiment or a diffraction grating to develop simplified equations like the following, where y is the distance of a fringe from the center of maximum light intensity, m is the order of the fringe, D is the distance between the slits and projection screen ...
The sine and the cosine functions, for example, are used to describe simple harmonic motion, which models many natural phenomena, such as the movement of a mass attached to a spring and, for small angles, the pendular motion of a mass hanging by a string. The sine and cosine functions are one-dimensional projections of uniform circular motion.
To find an unknown angle, the law of cosines is safer than the law of sines. The reason is that the value of sine for the angle of the triangle does not uniquely determine this angle. For example, if sin β = 0.5, the angle β can equal either 30° or 150°. Using the law of cosines avoids this problem: within the interval from 0° to 180° the ...
A geometric way of deriving the sine or cosine of 45° is by considering an isosceles right triangle with leg length 1. Since two of the angles in an isosceles triangle are equal, if the remaining angle is 90° for a right triangle, then the two equal angles are each 45°.
With these functions, one can answer virtually all questions about arbitrary triangles by using the law of sines and the law of cosines. [33] These laws can be used to compute the remaining angles and sides of any triangle as soon as two sides and their included angle or two angles and a side or three sides are known.