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.

Question

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.

In: 20

Answer 1

They are simply mathematical tools to make things easier for us engineers to do complex calculations. Emergent properties from maths. Like complex numbers, you can’t physically realize the complex plane but in electrical engineering you can think of the imaginary part of calculations as the reactive power of a circuit (the energy released by capacitors and inductors) as a basic example.