Why is Trigonometry used in so many applications that have nothing to do with triangles?
In: Mathematics
Teaching cos and sin using triangles is common. But in my opinion, it’s actually a poor way of explaining these functions.
Draw a circle centered at (0, 0) with a radius of 1. Imagine you’re an ant walking around the circle at rate of 1 distance unit per second.
After t seconds of walking around the circle you’ll be at some position (x, y). The cos and sin functions are simply the x and y coordinates here.
That is, after say 0.37 seconds, the ant’s x position is cos(0.37) and its y position is sin(0.37).
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