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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 ...
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.
The fact that the triple-angle formula for sine and cosine only involves powers of a single function allows one to relate the geometric problem of a compass and straightedge construction of angle trisection to the algebraic problem of solving a cubic equation, which allows one to prove that trisection is in general impossible using the given tools.
The law of sines (also known as the "sine rule") for an arbitrary triangle states: [85] = = = =, where is the area of the triangle and R is the radius of the circumscribed circle of the triangle:
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 / can be expressed using nested square roots of 2 in terms of .
The formula is still valid if x is a complex number, and is also called Euler's formula in this more general case. [1] Euler's formula is ubiquitous in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and engineering. The physicist Richard Feynman called the equation "our jewel" and "the most remarkable formula in mathematics". [2] When x = π, Euler's formula ...
Illustration of the sum formula. Draw a horizontal line (the x -axis); mark an origin O. Draw a line from O at an angle α {\displaystyle \alpha } above the horizontal line and a second line at an angle β {\displaystyle \beta } above that; the angle between the second line and the x -axis is α + β {\displaystyle \alpha +\beta } .