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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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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Once an angle opposite a known side is computed, the remaining side c can be computed using the law of sines. In the time before electronic calculators were available, this method was preferable to an application of the law of cosines c = √ a 2 + b 2 − 2 ab cos γ , as this latter law necessitated an additional lookup in a logarithm table ...
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 last step uses the half-angle formula. Much as modern trigonometry is built on the sine function, ancient trigonometry was built on the chord function. Hipparchus is purported to have written a twelve-volume work on chords, all now lost, so presumably, a great deal was known about them.