PLANE TRIGONOMETRY

Trigonometry is a branch of mathematics that studies relationships between the sides and angles of
triangles. Trigonometry is found all throughout geometry, as every straight-sided shape may be broken
into as a collection of triangles. Further still, trigonometry has astoundingly intricate relationships to other
branches of mathematics, in particular complex numbers, infinite series, logarithms and calculus.
The word trigonometry is a 16th-century Latin derivative from the Greek words for triangle (trigōnon) and
measure (metron). Though the field emerged in Greece during the third century B.C., some of the most
important contributions (such as the sine function) came from India in the fifth century A.D. Because early
trigonometric works of Ancient Greece have been lost, it is not known whether Indian scholars developed
trigonometry independently or after Greek influence. According to Victor Katz in “A History of Mathematics
(3rd Edition)” (Pearson, 2008), trigonometry developed primarily from the needs of Greek and Indian
astronomers.
An Example: Height of a Sail Boat Mast

Suppose you need to know the height of a sailboat mast, but are unable to climb it to measure. If the
mast is perpendicular to the deck and top of the mast is rigged to the deck, then the mast, deck and
rigging rope form a right triangle. If we know how far the rope is rigged from the mast, and the slant at
which the rope meets the deck, then all we need to determine the mast’s height is trigonometry.

For this demonstration, we need to examine a couple ways of describing “slant.” First is slope, which is a
ratio that compares how many units a line increases vertically (its rise) compared to how many units it
increases horizontally (its run). Slope is therefore calculated as rise divided by run. Suppose we measure
the rigging point as 30 feet (9.1 meters) from the base of the mast (the run). By multiplying the run by the
slope, we would get the rise — the mast height. Unfortunately, we don’t know the slope. We can,
however, find the angle of the rigging rope, and use it to find the slope. An angle is some portion of a full
circle, which is defined as having 360 degrees. This is easily measured with a protractor. Let’s suppose
the angle between the rigging rope and the deck is 71/360 of a circle, or 71 degrees.
We want the slope, but all we have is the angle. What we need is a relationship that relates the two. This
relationship is known as the “tangent function,” written as tan(x). The tangent of an angle gives its slope.
For our demo, the equation is: tan(71°) = 2.90. (We'll explain how we got that answer later.)
This means the slope of our rigging rope is 2.90. Since the rigging point is 30 feet from the base of the
mast, the mast must be 2.90 × 30 feet, or 87 feet tall. (It works the same in the metric system: 2.90 x 9.1
meters = 26.4 meters.)

The history of trigonometry

The timeline of trigonometric discovery is complicated by the fact that India and Arabia continued to excel
in the study for centuries after the passing of knowledge across cultural borders. For example, Madhava’s
1400 discovery of the infinite series of sine was unknown to Europe up through Isaac Newton’s
independent discovery in 1670. Due to these complications, we’ll focus exclusively on the discovery and
passage of sine, cosine, and tangent.

Beginning in the Middle East, seventh-century B.C. scholars of Neo-Babylonia determined a technique for
computing the rise times of fixed stars on the zodiac. It takes approximately 10 days for a different fixed
star to rise just before dawn, and there are three fixed stars in each of the 12 zodiacal signs; 10 × 12 × 3
= 360. The number 360 is close enough to the 365.24 days in a year but far more convenient to work
with. Nearly identical divisions are found in the texts of other ancient civilizations, such as Egypt and
the Indus Valley. According to Uta Merzbach in “A History of Mathematics” (Wiley, 2011), the adaptation
of this Babylonian technique by Greek scholar Hypsicles of Alexandria around 150 B.C. was likely the
inspiration for Hipparchus of Nicea (190 to 120 B.C.) to begin the trend of cutting the circle into 360
degrees. Using geometry, Hipparchus determined trigonometric values (for a function no longer used) for
increments of 7.5 degrees (a 48th of a circle). Ptolemy of Alexandria (A.D. 90 to 168), in his A.D. 148
“Almagest”, furthered the work of Hipparchus by determining trigonometric values for increments of 0.5
degrees (a 720th of a circle) from 0 to 180 degrees.

The oldest record of the sine function comes from fifth-century India in the work of Aryabhata (476 to
550). Verse 1.12 of the “Aryabhatiya” (499), instead of representing angles in degrees, contains a list of
sequential differences of sines of twenty-fourths of a right angle (increments of 3.75 degrees). This was
the launching point for much of trigonometry for centuries to come.

The next group of great scholars to inherit trigonometry were from the Golden Age of Islam. Al-Ma'mun
(813 to 833), the seventh caliph of the Abbasid Caliphate and creator of the House of Wisdom in
Baghdad, sponsored the translation of Ptolemy’s "Almagest" and Aryabhata’s "Aryabhatiya" into Arabic.
Soon after, Al-Khwārizmī (780 to 850) produced accurate sine and cosine tables in “Zīj al-Sindhind” (820).
It is through this work that that knowledge of trigonometry first came to Europe.

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