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Ah, the race-car example is bringing back memories! In the early days of Macromedia Flash, I wanted to build a GTA I clone. I didn't know about trigonometric f
by donquichotte 9y ago
Ah, the race-car example is bringing back memories!
In the early days of Macromedia Flash, I wanted to build a GTA I clone. I didn't know about trigonometric functions yet, so I had a line of height 1, width 0 that I rotated around one of its ends at a fixed angular velocity while the user pressed the left and right arrow keys.
Then I read the height and width of the rotated object and added it to the x and y coordinates of the car, respectively.
For some reason, trigonometry is treated pretty late in Swiss schools (often only during the Matura, where students are 16-20y/o). I never understood this, since understanding trig can be really useful in a lot of everyday situations.
- thanatropism 9y agoNot to mention necessary to solve a lot of intermediate steps in Further (intermediate, advanced and research) Mathematics. Maybe it's possible to learn about sines and cosines from Euler's identity up and forget about triangles altogether. This would enable you to do calculus, statistics, etc. But there's some value to teaching the theory of triangles as a beginner's introduction to pure mathematics (and hence the beauty in mathematics). --- What follows has to do with triangles, but is mostly offtopic. One of the clearest memories of my childhood, somewhere between ages 8 and 10, is a German-made (but dubbed into my language) TV educational show that had men in togas walking around Classical Greek ruins and dramatizing some scenes -- Diogenes and Alexander and so on. But what has sticked in my mind and still burns red hot was Pythagoras and his mates, crouched and drawing lines in the sand. After Pythagoras explains his hypothenuse theorem, someone interjects: "But this holds for all triangles?" "All triangles. All triangles that have ever been drawn -- and all triangles that will never be drawn." A sufficiently powerful brain scanning device probably can find this line somewhere inside my skull. It got me in big trouble: I'm not particularly intelligent, let alone disciplined, but I'm slogging through a Masters in mathematics, maybe dreaming about a PhD in physics because... I don't know. It's like when ghetto kids see some violent scene right in front of them and 20 years later their criminals. It sticks with you.
- bringtheaction 9y agoDo you remember the name of the show, or could you find it?
- hiccuphippo 9y agoI remember one with Donald Duck: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xyQBVMCVZws https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xyQBVMCVZws
- smogcutter 9y agoOh man, I watched Donald Duck in mathmagic land so many times as a kid. Good find!
- bringtheaction 9y agoIt’s a good one. Here it is in full. https://youtu.be/PvceKeHl0Sg https://youtu.be/PvceKeHl0Sg
- _sdegutis 9y agoWhat everyday situations can trigonometry be useful in?
- bigger_cheese 9y agoIf you want to work in Engineering knowledge of trig is a must have. For instance calculating the deflection of a structural beam as you load it with weight (a discipline known as statics), depends heavily on trig. Anything involving rotation and angular momentum (such as gears and axles) require knowledge about trig. Other than that triangulation- computing the distance between points is a useful practical application.
- webnrrd2k 9y agoYou rely om the results of trigonometry in the thousands of engineered object you encounter every day. Almost anything having to do with physics will have a fair amout of trig underlying it, and a lot of calculus relys on trig. So if you want to understand a lot of what's going on, you'll need trig. It's like asking "what everyday situations is addition useful in".
- JadeNB 9y ago> a lot of calculus relys on trig This seems like an exaggeration, at least from the point of view of calculus in the classroom, where the prevalence of trigonometric functions reflects only their convenience as examples. Did I misunderstand? Perhaps more apposite is differential equations, where trigonometric functions (or exponentials more generally) are ubiquitous.
- gdubs 9y agoI think that’s like saying one “uses” advanced physics every day because they use a cell phone. The OP question was probably asking more about what practical uses are there for normal people to actually use trig, the way you use arithmetic to calculate a tip at a restaurant. To that I’d say: finding the height of something only knowing the length of the base and an angle. Or triangulating your position, surveying your property to make a garden, etc.