A primer on Trigonometry?

Dec 20, 2011 at 9:05pm
While I am technically eligible to take the Calculus course the school I attend offers, I elected to take Trig this spring instead as that has cause mass amounts of head-ache for me in the past.

Before I actually go into that class, however, I would like to do a bit of self study. My problem is I'm not exactly sure where to find good online resources for self teaching math. I've done a google search or 20, but I'm not even sure where to go with it.
Dec 20, 2011 at 10:21pm
I don't know if this is a primer.... but this is the best I could come up with :P

http://www.amazon.com/Trigonometry-Beginners-Large-Print-Todhunter/dp/0554568683
Dec 21, 2011 at 1:28am
closed account (zwA4jE8b)
b = a*tan(theta)
Dec 21, 2011 at 1:56am
I posted this same thread on the mathlearning subreddit, they directed me to http://www.khanacademy.org/

I gotta say I already like it. They have literally thousands of video tutorials over hundreds of topics across various topics. And most the videos I've watched so far have been really great at what explaining the subject they covered.
Dec 21, 2011 at 3:21am
Video tutorials are slow.
¿could you post your course plannification? Trigonometry was just a subject, so I wonder what a full length course could reach.
Dec 21, 2011 at 5:45am
It's offered as a course in most colleges/universities around here.

And I don't exactly have one yet. I probably wont till I start the class in january
Dec 21, 2011 at 11:22am
Trigonometry can is as easy as SOH CAH TOA and c2 = a2 + b2. Everything is a right triangle.
Dec 21, 2011 at 12:06pm
This dosen't cover everything, but I found it useful:

http://wright.nasa.gov/airplane/trig.html

I found this when I was reading into a book on Neural Networks. In said book they used the cosine function, which I had never encountered before. Needless to say, Google gave me justice.
Dec 21, 2011 at 1:45pm
Don't they teach trigonometry in high school wherever you live? Or is this something advanced? (I wonder what advanced trig could be though.. Fourier series?)
Dec 21, 2011 at 1:54pm
I found this when I was reading into a book on Neural Networks. In said book they used the cosine function, which I had never encountered before. Needless to say, Google gave me justice.


...the fuck?
Dec 21, 2011 at 2:30pm
What kind of school were you in that didn't cover the cosine function?
Dec 21, 2011 at 7:48pm
To better understand the trigonometric functions, look up the unit circle. I would call this pre-calculus rather than trigonometry, though.

Since we're on a C++ forum, consider writing a program that draws a circle on the screen. The screen is a 2D (Cartesian) coordinate system. There are two challenges here: 1) how do we traverse the circle about its origin? 2) How do we get x and y coordinates for a position on the circle? For the first, a polar coordinate system makes this a simple for loop about the origin with a fixed radius. For the second, we need a function to translate the polar coordinates to Cartesian coordinates. Those functions are thus defined as the cosine and sine (for finding the x and y, respectively).

It's an interesting application of the unit circle concept. The unit circle begins at (1,0), or the farthest point right of the circle and traversal is typically counterclockwise. So when someone asks what the sine of 90 degrees is, you think of the point at the top center of the circle's y coordinate, which is 1.

I'm sure resources online should cover this better I, so I'll leave it at that. Hope this helps.
Dec 21, 2011 at 8:18pm
What kind of school were you in that didn't cover the cosine function?
...the fuck?


My High School does cover trigonometry. I'm just not in those classess yet. I was reading through the book on neural networks on my own.
Dec 22, 2011 at 1:59am
Trigonometry can is as easy as SOH CAH TOA and c2 = a2 + b2. Everything is a right triangle.


Hmm.. I am taught the reverse way i.e TOA CAH SOH in my schooling years.
Dec 22, 2011 at 2:50am
Either way it works for right angle trig :P
Dec 22, 2011 at 4:28pm
When it's not a right-angled triangle it doesn't get that much harder.

c2 = a2 + b2 becomes c2 = a2 + b2 - 2.a.b.cos C
Dec 22, 2011 at 9:58pm
This should help somewhat...
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Trigonometry
Dec 26, 2011 at 11:38am
i love this subject..
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