4 ms·
I ended up deriving sin and cos myself. I was trying to make a Spacewar-style game and knew I needed to make the ship move depending on how it was rotated. Plot
by teamonkey 7y ago
I ended up deriving sin and cos myself. I was trying to make a Spacewar-style game and knew I needed to make the ship move depending on how it was rotated. Plotted a circle on squared paper and tried to figure out the coordinates at the circumference for all the angles I was using.
Quite a surprise when I was finally introduced to trig at school and found out it had a name!
- xamuel 7y agoI was utterly confused by trigonometry in junior high, it seemed to be some kind of secret language I had missed the sacred initiation rites into. And everyone seemed to treat it as exactly that--meaningless esoterica. And then one day someone explained the high-level point to me: "Of the six quantities of a triangle (three angles and three sides), given any three of them, at least one of which is a side, the other three are automatically nailed down." Suddenly a switch was flipped. After that, the rest is just details that write themselves.
- SamBam 7y agoIndeed, anytime I move something on the screen at an angle for a distance, I have to do a quick check to remember whether the horizontal distance is sin or cos. I do this probably half a dozen times a month. (I'm not a quick learner.) I was kind of surprised that the article used circular motion as its main motivating point, since I feel like just moving at some angle is so much more common.