I have returned! Well, in truth, I never left. I've just been working, studying, and otherwise not writing, and yesterday I realized that I've gotten so far ahead in studying math that it's going to take several posts to catch up! That's not a bad thing - so I'm going to embark on a whirlwind tour of some of the things I've learned since our last meaningful time together in November (wow - has it been that long?), including some new trig concepts like polar coordinates, some neat problems I've run across, and even some brief forays into the mystical land of calculus! This first post, though, will just tackle the idea of the Inverse Trig Functions. Here we go!
Inverse Functions
So we know about sine, cosine, and tangent... and we even know about cosecant, secant, and cotangent, their multiplicative inverses. So these inverse functions are the compositional inverse. I'm talking about arcsin, arccosine, and arctangent - but if you've seen a graphing calculator, you'd probably recognize them by their more common notation: sin^-1, cos^-1, and tan^-1. Don't let the negative one exponent fool you - this is simply how we denote that we're looking for the inverse function. So what is that anyway? Well, look at the triangle here.
Say we know the length of sides a and b but we don't know the value of the angle θ.
Given what we already know, we can clearly say that tanθ = a / b, but that doesn't really tell us what the value of θ is. That's where the inverse functions come in. See, where the tanθ = a / b, the arctan a / b = θ! The same is true for the sine, cosine and all the rest. Simply put, when you're trying to get an angle and you know the values of some sides, you're going to be looking for inverse functions. Plus - they can be graphed just like our other functions can, but the results may surprise you. Take a look at what happens when we graph arcsin(x):
So we know about sine, cosine, and tangent... and we even know about cosecant, secant, and cotangent, their multiplicative inverses. So these inverse functions are the compositional inverse. I'm talking about arcsin, arccosine, and arctangent - but if you've seen a graphing calculator, you'd probably recognize them by their more common notation: sin^-1, cos^-1, and tan^-1. Don't let the negative one exponent fool you - this is simply how we denote that we're looking for the inverse function. So what is that anyway? Well, look at the triangle here.
Say we know the length of sides a and b but we don't know the value of the angle θ.
Given what we already know, we can clearly say that tanθ = a / b, but that doesn't really tell us what the value of θ is. That's where the inverse functions come in. See, where the tanθ = a / b, the arctan a / b = θ! The same is true for the sine, cosine and all the rest. Simply put, when you're trying to get an angle and you know the values of some sides, you're going to be looking for inverse functions. Plus - they can be graphed just like our other functions can, but the results may surprise you. Take a look at what happens when we graph arcsin(x):
The graph if sin(x) is in red - and the graph of arcsin(x) is in blue. It does something pretty interesting, and if we look at the green vertical line we can see that unlike the sine graph, the arcsine graph is not a function.
Now - think about this for a second and you may realize why this is the case. Picture the value of arcsin(x) as the angle at the center of the unit circle (because that's what it is). That value ranges, in each "quadrant" of the graph, between π/2 radians and - π/2 radians - or, 90 degrees and -90 degrees. Now picture those values rolled out as you continue around the circle. Your angle may be 5π radians, but you're in the same place as if you had only gone π radians - remember, one trip around the circle is 2π, so reduce in terms of that. Also, see that the value of sin(π) is the same as the value of sin(0). They're both zero.
In order to keep this from happening with inverse trig functions, and to actually make them functions, as the name implies, we have to define ranges for them. If we define the range of arcsin(x) as [- π/x, π/2] and the domain as [-1,1] we get something much nicer:
Now - think about this for a second and you may realize why this is the case. Picture the value of arcsin(x) as the angle at the center of the unit circle (because that's what it is). That value ranges, in each "quadrant" of the graph, between π/2 radians and - π/2 radians - or, 90 degrees and -90 degrees. Now picture those values rolled out as you continue around the circle. Your angle may be 5π radians, but you're in the same place as if you had only gone π radians - remember, one trip around the circle is 2π, so reduce in terms of that. Also, see that the value of sin(π) is the same as the value of sin(0). They're both zero.
In order to keep this from happening with inverse trig functions, and to actually make them functions, as the name implies, we have to define ranges for them. If we define the range of arcsin(x) as [- π/x, π/2] and the domain as [-1,1] we get something much nicer:
Plus, if we hit it with a vertical line test, we can see that yes, it indeed is a function now, and all is right with the world. This is the part of trig where one has to start thinking a little more aesthetically about the way things work - but after a while, it just becomes intuitive. There are a lot deeper implications to the inverse functions than I'm going to get into here, but this is a good introduction to the concept, I think.
That's all for now - more to come very soon, promise!
That's all for now - more to come very soon, promise!
RSS Feed