trigonometry

paddyc

I am going over the L cert maths course again after 10 years of not looking at it :mad:

I have no probs with the maths behind it, but I was wondering if you had to give 5 lines of a speech about uses for trigonometry in evert day life .... ie something to give the user a feel for the maths.... what would you say ....


... and it cant be engineers use it


hopefully questions like this will get the maths forum up and running


paddy

Keyzer

paddyc wrote:

I am going over the L cert maths course again after 10 years of not looking at it :mad:

I have no probs with the maths behind it, but I was wondering if you had to give 5 lines of a speech about uses for trigonometry in evert day life .... ie something to give the user a feel for the maths.... what would you say ....


... and it cant be engineers use it


hopefully questions like this will get the maths forum up and running


paddy

Unless you are an engineer or an architect, I don't think it has any pratical uses. If i could go back in time to my secondary schooldays I would beat the living crap out of my maths teacher at the time. He terrified us into learning the Theorem of my arse et all and for what? ...

Yakuza

Most of us use angles etc without thinking about it..

Snooker / pool players use it instinctively, when playing cushion shots - that the ball will bounce off the cushion at the same angle it came in at (assuming no spin etc hehe).

Carpenters know that they need to make 45 degree cuts in wood, if two pieces are to join correctly (for example the top and side pieces of an architrave).

If we're crossing the road, and walking down it at the same time, you can cross it at 45 degrees, to maximise distance travelled down the road, while minising time spent on the road.

Artillery gunners will use trig to calculate projectile paths, taking elevation etc into account. (Well, maybe not so much these days with laser-guided rockets etc).

Sailors used it in the past to calculate (with a sextant) their latitude. GPS etc has made this a little irrelevant, but I'd bet a good proportion of sailors can still use the traditional methods.

While we don't use those theorems etc every day, we certainly use stuff derived from them, most of the time without thinking about it (or pehaps even knowing about it's origins).

Also, trig is but one branch of maths. There are many others (from basic aritmethic to probability, statistics, calculus, calulations of volumes / areas / distances among others) that we use all the time.

David19

Taken from Wikipedia:

"There are an enormous number of applications of trigonometry. Of particular value is the technique of triangulation which is used in astronomy to measure the distance to nearby stars, in geography to measure distances between landmarks, and in satellite navigation systems. Other fields which make use of trigonometry include astronomy (and hence navigation, on the oceans, in aircraft, and in space), music theory, acoustics, optics, analysis of financial markets, electronics, probability theory, statistics, biology, medical imaging (CAT scans and ultrasound), pharmacy, chemistry, number theory (and hence cryptology), seismology, meteorology, oceanography, many physical sciences, land surveying and geodesy, architecture, phonetics, economics, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, civil engineering, computer graphics, cartography, crystallography."

Sounds fairly useful!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trigonometry

Yakuza

I should also have mentioned that GPS, while replacing the sextant for sailors, itself uses trig to calculate its position (based on the location of the satellites etc). So, you're using trig whether you use old or new methods!

Pherekydes

paddyc wrote:

hopefully questions like this will get the maths forum up and running

:eek:

I've been reading posts here for the last year.



Mathematics: Threads:184 Posts:4,268

breadmonkey

I love maths, but I'm still waiting for the day when I need to make a box with the maximum volume out of a sheet of cardboard!

OMcGovern

Okay, it's sort of been mentioned under computer graphics, but "games development" would really appeal to a lot of teenagers struggling to justify doing maths today.
You need a LOT of geometry and trignometry skills to develop the latest games.
All computer programming stuff I admit, which does fall under engineering....