What is the purpose, if any, of secant, cosecant, and cotangent? I’m an engineering student so I use sine, cosine, and tangent a lot, but almost never the other 3. Creating a new trig function just to be the reciprocal seems to be a bit redundant.
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It’s mostly just an archaic thing we don’t really need anymore.
Before modern calculators, the way you’d calculate sin, cos, and tan values was with a big table of values of the different trig functions for different angles.
In that context, it was useful to have separate columns for sec and cosec rather than everyone having to calculate that themselves.
Now, you’re probably not going to be doing trigonometry without a calculator, so it’s not really convenient to have special names for these values when it’s easy to just enter 1/sin(46) or whatever.
They’re mostly not worth teaching now, and to be fair any decent maths course won’t spend a lot of time on them. I suppose it’s useful to learn so that students don’t get too confused if they encounter it in older resources.
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