Trig Functions

[Howard Owen]

This from the Onion,


and this from Scientific American .

[Pier Aiello]

Nice :)

[Namir]

Cute but I would not write home about it!!!

I was dabbling with DEFINING NEW TRIG FUNCTIONS recently, and I tell you that coming up with zinger functions IS NOT EASY!!!

Namir

[Garth Wilson]

How did our space program ever get going without them?! Idiotic.

[Namir]

Very idiotic!!!!

[Katie Wasserman]

Yeah, but they have fun names! My favorite semi-obscure mathematics terms are 'subtrahend' and 'minuend'. I think everyone from my generation learned them in grade school in the USA but most promptly forgot them since they were never used again. I always thought that they would make excellent names for a pair of small dogs.

Edited: 14 Sept 2013, 9:10 p.m.

[Pier Aiello]

Obscure? I filled entire pages of subtrahend and minuend in my firsts grades, just to memorize those terms. Damn teacher.

Edited: 15 Sept 2013, 4:34 p.m. after one or more responses were posted

[Gerson W. Barbosa]

Here (in Brazil) we call them minuendo and subtraendo. I've just correctly guessed what the latter should be in Italian: sottraendo. This makes for a nice mnemonic. From Wikipedia:

--------------------------------

Per fare una sottrazione in colonna bisogna prima scrivere il minuendo, e sotto, il sottraendo: 86 - 34 = 52

86-

34=

--

52

--------------------------------

These were taught in first or second grade, I think. Good old days when memory was always fresh and neurons worked at full speed :-)

[Massimo Gnerucci (Italy)]

Well done Gerson, A+ or, as we were used here, 10+

:)

[Gerson W. Barbosa]

Grazie, Massimo! :-)

Numeric grades are used here as well, but for a while we had alpha grades in high-school, which I disliked.

[Eddie W. Shore]

LOL. I loved the Onion article.

[Fred Lusk]

Some of those "new" trig functions were used by surveyors in the pre-computer days and may still be used by them from time to time. I was introduced to them when I took Surveying I & II in college. But, since I'm a civil engineer and I have a computer, I have no need for them any more.