4 ms·
It's a US thing. Europeans just write 1/cos(x) instead of treating it as a special thing with its own name. The Americans have sec, csc, and a bunch of others I
by Sesse__ 2y ago
It's a US thing. Europeans just write 1/cos(x) instead of treating it as a special thing with its own name. The Americans have sec, csc, and a bunch of others I never bothered to learn. It doesn't seem to add all that much to me? (Of course, it's a bit hypocritical since I gladly use tan(x).)
- RichardLake 2y agoI imagine it was more useful when using tables to lookup/approximate the values before calculators with trig support were a thing.
- GeoAtreides 2y agospeak for your own european country, in my neck of the woods (EE) we were taught and we worked with both secant and cosecant.
- oersted 2y agoThey were taught to us in Spain, I suppose they don't make an appearance often, but they are perfectly familiar.
- sebzim4500 2y agoIn the UK we certainly use sec(x)
- fsckboy 2y agothere are these old-fashioned looking drawings... (quick search, didn't find the old ones, but similar to these) https://mathematicaldaily.weebly.com/secant-cosecant-cotangent.html https://mathematicaldaily.weebly.com/secant-cosecant-cotange... https://www.pinterest.com/pin/enter-image-description-here--354869645630505834/ https://www.pinterest.com/pin/enter-image-description-here--... ... which were not used in my education but whenever i saw them i wished they had been, they lay out a geometric interpretation of all of them. by "old" i mean "look like Leonardo drew them"
- thelaxiankey2 2y agothe only other one is cot, actually. Personally I thought they were nice to have because coming up with the integral of 1/cos on the fly is pretty brutal in a long integral
- jebarker 2y agoI used sec, cosec and others during my math degree in the UK too.