General Question

LanceVance's avatar

Why do sine and cosine have values at 90° and 0°?

Asked by LanceVance (645points) March 1st, 2009

A premise says trigonometric function can only be applied in a right triangle. There seems to be a logical contradiction. How can you have a right triangle with two 90° or with 0° ?

Or put another way, as θ is zero, we have a line. As it goes from 0° to 90°, the cathetus opposite to θ get’s bigger and bigger, but it cannot reach 90° since that kind of triangle does not exist.

The same applies to cosine. Let θ be 0°. Is that a (right) triangle? Nope. Yet cosine still equals 1 when θ equals 0° and also cosine equals 0 when θ equals 90°. When θ reaches 90° the cathetus perpendicular to cosine cathetus becomes the hypotenuse.

To finalize, I see two problems in these values.
-How can a triangle have two 90° angles?
-When θ reaches 90°, the cathetus opposite to it becomes a hypotenuse, therefore we actually calculate cosine by dividing two cathetus, which is not the definition of cosine or but otherwise, when θ is 90° we calculate sine by dividing hypotenuse with catethus, which again, is not the way sine is calculated.

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7 Answers

LostInParadise's avatar

There is no premise that a trigonometric function can only be applied in a right triangle. How would it be possible to talk about trigonometric functions of angles greater than 180?

Sine and cosine are simply the ratio of horizontal and vertical projections to the length of a segment making a specified angle with respect to a reference line. Since a segment with a 0 degree angle has no vertical projection, its cosine is zero. Similarly, for the sine of a 90 degree angle being 1.

omfgTALIjustIMDu's avatar

Think of the unit circle, not in terms of a random right triangle.

toomuchcoffee911's avatar

If you balance the sig cos value and divide it by the square root of the numerical value of the triangle, you should come up with the answer. But that’s only when you have to solve for X otherwise the 90° will come out doubled. An easy way to fix that is before the multiplication, you just need to simplify the right angle fraction.

Hope this helps!

mrswho's avatar

Speaking of this, what is cos times sin?

Waffle's avatar

“trigonometric function can only be applied in a right triangle.”

^ That’s not true ^

toomuchcoffee911's avatar

@mrswho That’s an easy one. Cos x sin is 412<84 divided by the number of right angles, then subtract that by whatever you answer was. Then multiply all that by 94%, after justifying the constraints.

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