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Comment by replicant

As young students, we are taught that these functions are ratios of sides on right angles. It is fairly intuitive for them that provided they can draw a right triangle, they just need to measure the sides. And it is easy to accept that someone computed sines and cosines for a lot of angles and put it in a table. My point being, that we didn't need (in the past) calculus to compute trigonometric functions, and I don't see how it is a burden for students to be introduced to those functions without the Calculus definition.

And the reality is, that the definition of sine as a ratio of the catheti and hypotenuse is a rigorous definition of the function. Strictly, this sine is different from the sine of calculus. The first, the sine from Euclidean geometry, assigns a real to pair of rays, while the calculus sine, is function from the real numbers to the reals. And it does take some work to link them formally.

parent replicant 11 years ago

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