Can someone tell my what cos, sin and tan actually measure?

Question

Can someone tell my what cos, sin and tan actually measure?

In: Mathematics

Answer 1

I never appreciated trigonometry in high school. But, then I became interested in creating computer games and I found that I needed to use sin and cos in order to calculate points in 2d/3d space. I use atan to find the angle between 2 points.

Basically, if you have an angle, like the heading of an airplane, you can calculate the x and y coordinates for other points using sin and cos. It is very useful in programming with graphics.