On 2013-04-09 14:56, John Sessoms wrote:
Looking back, I can't believe that my High School Trig course never once mentioned that Sine, Cosine and Tangent are all based on the relationship of the sides of a triangle. That would have made it so easy.
Holy Crap! I can't believe that, either! <sarcasm>I mean, it's not like the transcendentals grew directly out of the triangles or anything.</sarcasm>
It's along the lines of my experience with physics. In regular high school physics classes, they couldn't assume we knew even rudimentary calculus, so we had to memorize a gazillion discrete formulae. F=ma, P=mv, E=mv^2/2, etc. It got much simpler in college when we did know calculus and discovered that you really only need to know a handful of basic equations, and a little basic calculus, and you can derive all of the other formulae you need.
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