Factsheet
So I get that Sin, Cos and Tan are used to find angles in a triangle using the length of sides, but what’s the equation behind the function? i.e. how does sin(90) become 1? What’s the series of calculations that have to be done?
In the way that to go from 10 to 200 you multiply 10 by 20, how do you get from sin(90) to 1?
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All of the values in your picture can be deduced from two theorems:
- The Pythagorean theorem: If a right triangle has sides
where
is the hypotenuse, then
- If a right triangle has an angle of
, then the length of the side opposite to that angle is half the length of the hypotenuse.
Both can be proven with elementary high school geometry.
Let's see how this works for Quadrant I (angles between and
), as the rest follows from identities.
; this is clear from the definition.
; less intuitive because it breaks the triangle, but
, and
because the adjacent side and the hypotenuse coincide when the angle is
.
; this corresponds to an isosceles triangle, and if we set the sides to be
, then by the Pythagorean theorem, the hypotenuse is
.
; this follows immediately from theorem 2 above.
; if we take a
triangle, and set the side opposite to the
angle to be
, then the hypotenuse is
and the side opposite to the
angle satisfies
, so its length is
- and thus
.
As in Alfonso Fernandez's answer, the remarkable values in your diagram can be calculated with basic plane geometry. Historically, the values for the trig functions were deduced from those using the half-angle and angle addition formulae. So since you know 30°, you can then use the half-angle formula to compute 15, 7.5, 3.25, 1.125, and 0.5625 degrees. Now use the angle addition formula to compute 0.5625° + 0.5625° = 2*0.5625°, and so on for 3*0.5625°, 4*0.5625°...
These would be calculated by hand over long periods of time, then printed up in long tables that filled entire books. When an engineer or a mariner needed to know a particular trig value, he would look up the closest value available in his book of trig tables, and use that.
Dominic Michaelis points out that in higher math the trig functions are defined without reference to geometry, and this allows one to come up with explicit formulae for them. You may reject this as mere formalist mumbo-jumbo, but conceptually I find that the university-level definitions for the trig functions make much more sense than the geometric ones, because it clears the mystery on why these functions turn up in situations that have nothing to do with angles or circles. So eventually you may lose your desire to have the values computed from the geometrical definition.
Of course, if you're going to be using the geometrical definition anyway, you could also just grab a ruler and a protractor and measure away all night, and compute a table of trig values that way.
One final note: you're still using the "ratio of sides of a triangle" definition for the trig functions. I strongly recommend you abandon this definition in favor of the circular definition: is the height of an angle
, divided by the length of the arm of the angle,
is the same for the width of an angle, and
is the slope of the arm of the angle. The reason why I recommend you use this definition is because, while it's as conceptually meaningful as the triangular one (once you think about it for a second), it allows you to easily see where the values for angles greater than 90° are coming from. The triangular definition is so limited that I personally find it destructive to even bother teaching in school, I wonder if it wouldn't be easier to jump right in with the circular definition. I know it held me back for years.



