Omnimaga
Calculator Community => TI Calculators => TI-BASIC => Topic started by: miotatsu on April 10, 2010, 02:41:42 am
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okay so
a graphing calculator can take an angle and return an answer based on a trig function amirite?
like you can do sin(45 on a ti-84+ homescreen and it returns the sin of a 45 degree angle correct?
If that is correct i am really confused, because i just learned about sin/cos/tan in school and apparently they are just side/angle relationships of a triangle
for instance sin is supposed to be
opposite side/hypotenusebut if you only are inputting an angle then how on earth does it know what the opposite side AND the hypotenuse are?!?!
i really want to figure this out because until i do i will never be able to understand trig. ;.;
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It doesn't. It knows the ratio between them.
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OH, that makes a lot more sense, but i don't fully get it yet
nvm, i fully understand it now :O
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Trigonometry is far more than just right-triangle-calculations. ;)
(strange... We learned this really early on at school. You're older than me, so...)
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I can try to explain some later, if I manage to think of how to word it all haha, but Builderboy wrote a tutorial about trig here (http://ourl.ca/4279/84115) so that might help in the mean time. I really need some sleep so I'll try coming up with something tomorrow for ya :)
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You use the unit triangle. That means the hypotenuse has length 1. In such a triangle, the side opposite to the angle is the sin of the angle and the side adjacent is the cosine. That's why the identity sin^2+cos^2=1 because its just the Pythagorean theorem of that triangle.
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Ya, the Unit Circle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_circle) is a huge part of Trig.