Well its day 0 now since you technically used them in this meme even if it was only the words
Smartass!
So you’re saying the real reason we learn about trigonometry is so we can talk about how pointless and shit it was to learn
So when I type the word “sink” I’ve used the sin() function?
I sin everyday.
cos i have to
tan I go to bed
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Basic trigonometry is super useful and not that hard to understand or memorize.
It’s because trigonometry is used to teach people geometry and nothing in real life application. You want basic trigonometry in real life we should use physics as a basis for why trigonometry is useful in real life. You can’t expect theory to be used in practicality when nobody has any experience.
I don’t understand, out of all of the things that we teach students in schools, out of all of the things that people don’t demand justification for learning, why Maths gets all of the flak. It’s the foundation on which the universe exists. If people don’t understand that they’re not just learning trigonometry “just cuz” then they probably don’t have much of a career in STEM planned for themselves. Which is fine, but western society’s blindspot for STEM is 100% attributed to the intentional undermining and dumbing-down of the education system.
We regularly don’t give students justification for why they learn grammar, biology, chemistry, physics, visual art, and music. But as soon as you show someone a standard polynomial, they lose their fucking minds.
For me, my “education” with math was "when you see this: 5/73¥π7^t then you use 5-8(25&6)_9gh8/6 not 5&6(9!4_89) ok memorize it for the test.
Oh you want to know why or what it does or what it even is? No that’s college work. You’re in highschool, memorize it because reasons.
Yeah… That’s not how my brain works no matter how badly I wish I did. I need to UNDERSTAND not memorize! I can’t memorize seemingly arbitrary bullshit that has no explained meaning. My brain instantly tosses it as irrelevant information.
Same but “you’re in middle school, that’s high school stuff”
I find that the best way for me to learn is to learn the use of something first , then find that something . Exploring a problem and finding the solution is way more engaging than repeating a basic task over and over again . And unfortunately schools , at least in western countries don’t have space for those things . Its all cramming cramming cramming , which sucks , both for the students who are weaker in a subject and those who are better at it .
Students often reach for tools to bypass problems , not realising how useful that tool would be at understanding the problem . Learning becomes a chore , not something that one does for self improvement .
In the US this is enforced even more by imperial units , which put one more roadblock when students try to use what they learned in a way which has any connection to the real world .
It hurts , both being a student which has large voids in knowledge that is expected , being a student which is ahead of material by a large margin and seeing other students struggle with tasks , to me , simple . It hurts knowing how complex of a problem this is , especially as one notes its connections to the wider world , both how failures of the education system hurt our society and how society is not able to help our schools .
I dunno, I see people complain about “why do we have to read books that are hundreds of years old?” too pretty frequently. Some people are just hostile to education. Honestly, cost aside, I’m a little disappointed in the number of people who complain about college as if the only thing you get out of college is a piece of paper.
It’s a valid complaint. Why is Shakespeare more legitimate than, say, Stephen King for high school classes? Reading is reading, and asking students to read boring books because “they are classics” is the best way to discourage them.
In high school, I had to read Phèdre, a story told in verses about some incestuous rednecks from Greek mythology or whatever, written in the 1600’s. It was painful.
For that matter, why do we read Shakespeare? They’re plays. Watch them as plays or movies. If kids first exposure to Star Wars was by reading the script, they’d hate that, too, and they should.
I had to read Shakespeare, then read another book about how witty and clever it was to the people of the time, then write a report about how witty and clever it was, once I understood the historical context. My conclusion that having to explain jokes is the death of humor got me a C-.
There are a lot more authors who took inspiration from shakespeare than Steven King. Shakespeare is just objectively more influential, tropes he invented are used all the time in many places and there is value to understanding where the source comes from.
I think there’s something to be said about shared cultural experiences, and so reading some older books is probably a good thing.
To clarify what I mean though: that means that we should be reading stuff that was written/popular when our grandparents were our age. Going back 200+ years should be saved for a history class cause that’s the real value in reading that material. In my opinion, Great Gatsby should be about the oldest book kids need to be reading for a literature class these days, and even that’s pushing it.
It’s the exposure that undermines it. Their isn’t enough exposure to real life application and examples. How many people never realise that velocity is a derivative of position over time or acceleration is a derivative of velocity over time. Or that the speed of light is a horizontal asymptote for matter.
Ah yes, because plumbers, electricians, and brick layers never have to deal with geometry. That being said, none of my geometry education was taught with a practical motivation. But that being said, I was in the advanced track classes, so none of us were becoming professional carpenters. I’m actually probably one of the most “hands-on” people from that class, both in my job and in my life. I build scientific instruments and enjoy fixing things around the house.
Trig is honestly the math I’ve used the most since finishing school. But to be fair, that is mostly because it’s useful as hell when doing game development as a hobby.
Or building some stairs or really a ton of shit. Basic trig is such a useful thing that it tells me people who complain about it have never built anything, virtual or physical.
as I’ve said in a different comment , it sucks how little space school gives to recreational usage of the skills we learn . I deeply enjoy recreational linguistics , writing , yet school seldom gave me the tools I find useful , having to find them on my own , despite being thought them previously .
if you were a more interesting person you could make up a use for them
Best take right here. Trig shows up a lot when you actually do stuff. Woodworking, programming, physics, art, music, philosophy. Math shit is universal human language.
Math shit is universal
humanlanguageMath shit is universal
humanlanguage. True.But the language part of it is pretty human.
The other fields I get (trig is insanely useful), but how the bloody hell does one use trig functions in philosophy? Are we gonna be triangulating the border of science to solve the demarcation problem?
Math is philosophy, and trig does a very good job of describing the world we experience. The unit circle, right angles, pythagorean theorem, sinusoidal damping, etc, are all pretty philosophical concepts. What else could the be.
I like doing stuff but my adhd literally won’t let me learn trig 🤣 my brain will just shut down and start daydreaming of literally anything else.
Don’t tell yourself that, unless you’re just not that interested. It takes more work and catering some creative solutions, but it is worth it. I got an engineering degree before I was ever even diagnosed or medicated.
Honestly. If you’ve ever played a videogame, it will inevitably require trig.
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I’m might be splitting hairs, but I would argue by virtue of using a machine that uses trig, an individual is using trig, though abstractly. I’m sure you’re brother is dumb, yes.
The only function is sine, the rest are just remixes and ratios
Or cos if your weird
Or some say Kosm.
man I was talking about bloodborne today at work and I miss that game, might be time for a replay. Sucks that its 30fps tho
Yeah and I’ll bet you use Tau instead of Pi, don’t you, you human scum.
Sin(x+π/2)
cos(x-π/2)
It’s true.
Cos(x) is just the derivative of sin(x)
You may have used them indirectly in the compression of your image
Fair enough, but did they use it? I always felt like focusing on statistics instead of random trig stuff for non stem people people would be more useful
Sticking with image compression, see Quite Okay Images. It treats each pixel as three numbers and expects mostly small changes. Recent pixels get hashed and can be referenced in a few bits. This is enough to compete with PNG filesizes, an order of magnitude faster, while handling each pixel exactly once.
though note than lossy formats , like JPEG which was used here , do use Fourier transforms , which are very intense trigonometry . IIRC PNG doesn’t use trigonometry either ,
though I’m not entirely sureyup PNG uses DEFLATE after some filtering , so no sine there I believe
Agreed, I use highschool level stats knowledge on a nearly daily basis, whereas the last time I did any trig was to follow along with a math video I was watching on YouTube. Trig/calc were mandatory, stats was not.
And stats really should be a mainline math class in high school. It comes up in so many places, and is far too often simplified away into a binary black & white choice.
Any time something happens that was predicted to be less than 50% likely, people lose their shit. For instance, when it unexpectedly rains or the wrong person wins an election.
But it’s not even being able to run the numbers or understanding statistical significance. It’s much more basic, just understanding that probabilities and uncertainty exist and are everywhere. My favorite example is when going to the doctor. They explain that whatever you have is probably X or Y, with a small chance of Z, but Y has been going around a lot and is easy to treat, so let’s try medication A for it. Then when that gets reported to friends and family afterwards, it’s “she said I have Y and I need A to fix it.”
Plus, if someone needs calculus for their major, they’ll just make them take it again in college. Why build high school math around it?
JPEG uses a lossy form of compression based on the discrete cosine transform (DCT).
Many modern compression schemes are more about signal processing than statistics , especially the lossy ones . IIRC 3blue1brown has a video on image compression if you want to learn about it in a visual way
Alternatively, you could be this guy.
I aspire to be this man when I am that old.
Woah. I was really expecting the “will we ever use this in life”/“you won’t but some of the smarter kids might” strip, which is also SMBC.
I like math :) Its mysterious and fascinating and constantly surprising, like seeing the source code of the universe. Closest shit we have to actual magic.
Do I like math? Yes
Do I understand a tiny bit of it? Absolutely not
Me, whose going to start studying EE: 😭
HAHAHAHA GOOD LUCK! I’m in my final year of my EE study and I cannot wait to escape this mental asylum
Electrical Engineers are the psychos for using j instead of i. Absolutely bonkers.
Yeah, I agree. They messed up the scheme we had going. It was a good thing, and electrical engineers had to come and be all different, confusing everyone else along the way.
imagine using i instead of e1^e2
There is hope for you after the asylum. My daughter has an EE degree. While in school, she would call me every October and tell me how terrible it was and that she wanted to drop out. I would talk her off the ledge, and she got through.
Now she’s working, making more money than I do in her early twenties, and she loves loves loves her job.
Keep going!
Luckily I have 6 years of Electronics manufacturing experience, so the math and theory are the things I’ll need to learn most of. Unfortunately, those things are the hardest part…
Don’t worry.
Trig is not hard ☺️
Compared to what you’re also gonna learn 🤣
Signed, An EE graduate from 2016, who now works in embedded fixed point signal processing 😵
I use it all the time. I’m an engineer though so it doesn’t really counteract what you’re saying.
Contradict.
Counteract is also valid.
This is a counteraction.
Counteract means to oppose something to reduce its effect. Contradict means to say or do something opposite or inconsistent with something else.
Note how they are not mutually exclusive
Perfect, I can now use any word thats not mutually exclusive completely dependently (interchangeably) and be appreciated (understood)
No, you definitely still have to match the meaning to the context. That’s pretty fundamental to communication.
This attempted contradiction doesn’t seem to counteract the above comment.
One day, while working on a website, I was wondering how to calculate a specific point in a graph. After googling, the answer was by using sine and cosine. Mind blew away, I had always thought I’d never use them.
And guess what? You found it out without having to memorize the process until you knew it by heart.
Apparently, they didn’t know it by heart. If they had, they wouldn’t have had to spend all that time searching.
The point being that memorizing complex math is pointless unless you’re using it for some sort of day to day.
Complex? It’s just Sohcahtoa my friend
I thought this was early high-school level stuff.
Since becoming an adult it has become increasingly obvious to me that early high-school level stuff is impossibly complex for a significant chunk of the population.
It’s unfortunate that you are correct. However, when it comes to memorization, trig seems pretty tame. That one mnemonic just about covers it all. Even multiplication tables seem like a larger memorization effort to me.
Instructions unclear. Toe is still dry, dick stuck in super soaker.
Not really. The point of getting really good at it in your teenage years is so that when it shows up 30 years later you have a vauge idea of what you’re looking at and can figure it out again. If you had only a surface level understanding to begin with, it’ll all be totally gone by the time you need it again, and very few people have the gumption to teach themselves a subject from scratch.
The reason they drill it in to the extent that they do is so that you have a foundational understanding of the underlying math on which to build new knowledge. If you show up in calc 1 in college without remembering even the basic concepts you were previously taught in things like trig…that can really bite you in the ass. My teacher LOVED pulling out classic substitutions for Secant, Cosecant, and cotangent (No, i didnt outright remember them from Trig, but I had seen them, and that made refreshing much easier). Also these concepts then form the basis of many other fields such as physics (electricity/magnetism, kinetic motion, optics, etc.), chemistry (quantum, MO theory, and things relating to the physics side of why chemistry occurs), and many of the graphing concepts used in engineering/stem only make sense if you have the foundational understanding of what integration/derivation are. Those stem from understanding how to graph complex functions by hand (like we did in trig) so that when you are doing it later with assistance, you still GRASP what is going on.
Yes its not perfect, and yes for people who never need that later in life it can suck. However, I would make the argument it is better to have more of your population educated to a higher standard than what is needed in daily life, than to only give that to those who are aware enough at a young age to actively seek said education
Personally once you got to the Cos Sin Tan and Log part of math in grade 11 and 12 no amount of practice ever improved my understanding of the underlying principles. Once most of the work gets done in the calculator or computer I just lost sense of what was happening in the background. It’s just turned into put number in calculator and get answer. But that’s probably just a failing of the local school systems methods or the individual teachers maybe.
That’s where math starts getting spicy though!
You gain a new appreciation for logarithms when you do statistics.
There will be those that do and dont get the “nitty gritty” of the theory side of the math. Those people sometimes become math majors. Normal people (joking, dont be mad math majors), need more than simply the theory side of the math and actually need to see/perform the application side of things. I never once “understood” the lesson in math class when we go over the equations with variables only. I only truly began to learn the material and be able to use it once we got to the example problems. We would do multiple in class and then I would understand how to literally go through the problem and perform the math that was expected of me on the homework, and subsequently the test. There is tons of stuff i know how to use in math, but by no means understand WHY it came to be, or HOW its works for the realm of mathematics. I wanna know how this math can help me solve real life problems, problems I will face in industry, or even just a cool way to apply math in the real world. Not how it will be used in research to find new types of math we wont be able to apply for 70 years.
It was pretty funny being in calculus in college. I was in a class with mostly engineers who were also taking the exact same weed out courses, and nearly every day after the professor would finish showing us the theory side of the lesson, hands would shoot up and the question of, “What application does this have in real life or engineering? Like, how will I actually use this?” always got asked. So not “loving” the theory is by no means uncommon (we all wished for an application focused version of the class to exist, for people like stem students who are not into the math theory lol), but I still see the value in having it presented so that you can have a more foundational understanding instead simply going through the motions
Trigonometry is extremely useful when constructing things. Need to know the length of wood needed to go from corner to corner. That’s trig my friend.
Go on…
A^2 + B^2 = C^2 is known as the Pythagorean theorem. This theorem explains the proportionality of the 3 sides of a right triangle (a triangle with 1 corner angle = 90 degrees). If you know the length of 2 sides (in his example, the wall beams) you can find out the length of the third (in his example, this would be the supporting strut spanning the beams that meet at a 90 degree angle). If their example is explaining a beam that spans the room from 1 corner to the other, you still use this formula as a rectangle is 2 right triangles that meet along their hypotenuse (the longest leg of a right triangle, or the length you are solving for in this problem). The 2 known sides are the length/width of the room, and you solve for the 3rd side, your diagonal beam
Did Pythagoras even know about sin, cos and tan? I am reluctant to call A^2 +B^2 =C^2 trigonometry.
Hipparchus, the alleged founder of trigonometry, was alive 350 years after Pythagoras (500BC to 150BC).
Completely fair point, that I do not think I have the knowledge to speak on. On the Trigonometry Wikipedia page, he pops up a few times, and many trig identities are known as pythagorean identities. Perhaps its not fully trig, but was used as a basis to help discover trig? Without having the understanding pythagorus gave mathematicians regarding triangles, I would think it would be pretty hard to begin developing deeper math regarding said triangles
Squaring using 3+4=5 is one of the oldest relationships used by masons. don’t need a ruler, just a piece of string or straight edge. Pythagoras described the relationship on paper
[TRIGONOMETRY WARNING]
I see you have never built a chicken coop.
I must be missing something in this comment.
Can someone tell me how chicken coops are related to that ?
One common application of trig is figuring out lengths and angles of triangles. Planning on building anything usually involves triangles.
Building anything requires trigonometry, unless you just say “fuck it” and hope the thing doesn’t fall apart, which is a pretty stupid way to live life.
I’m not sure what you’re building but you might be over-engineering your wall shelving.
Chicken coops have a ramp for the entrance, so when building it, you need to know the length of the ramp required for the desired angle, as well as making the"rungs" (I don’t know what they are actually called) on said ramp flush with the ground.
Thanks !
