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

I actually used the cotangent function in a scientific article because it was more convenient, in writing the equation, to show multiplication by the cotangent than division by the tangent. In that instance I was calculating the area of a right triangle based on the trapezoid created by truncating the larger triangle.