Can someone tell my what cos, sin and tan actually measure?
In: Mathematics
The ratio between the sides of a right triangle.
Once you fix one of the angles of a right triangle (I mean, one of the angles other than the right angle), you fix the shape of the triangle. You can make it bigger or smaller, but the shape has been fixed and so too have the *relative* lengths of the sides. That means if you have one angle and one side you can completely describe the right triangle.
Those trig functions take one angle as an input and output the ratio between two of the sides.
That’s where the functions originally came from, but it turns out that they also show up in all sorts of places that have nothing (obvious) to do with right triangles.
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