Precal History of Trig
Precal History of Trig
Precal History of Trig
Mrs. Montomery
Pre-Calculus H 3rd
Paula Faur
Faur 1
Trigonometry is the backbone of calculus. It has been around since 2000 B.C. in
Egyptian and Babylonian mathematics. The word trigonometry comes from the Greek word
trigonometria, meaning "triangle measuring". Ancient cultures had theorems of the ratios of
sides of triangles for centuries. However, they lacked the idea of angle measure so they were
restricted to studying just the sides of triangles. The Egyptians used trigonometry to build the
pyramids; astronomers used them to study the heavens. The ancient Greek and Hellenistic
cultures used chords. A chord is the line that crosses from one end of an arc to another. The
formula is chord a = 2sin(a/2) Consequentially, all the theorems that are known to us today were
also known to the Greeks in chord form. The first trigonometric table was made by Hipparchus
of Nicaea , now known as "the father of trigonometry." Hipparchus was the first to record the
corresponding values of arc and chord for a series of angles. The use of 360 degrees for a full
circle may come from Hipparchus. He was probably inspired by Hypsicles who had earlier
divided the day into 360 parts, a division of the day that may have been suggested by Babylonian
astronomy. It is due to the Babylonian sexagesimal numeral system that each degree is divided
into sixty minutes and each minute is divided into sixty seconds. Menelaus of Alexandria wrote
three books, all called the spherica. In Book I, he made an argument for spherical triangles that
are like the Euclidean basis for plane triangles. He established is that the sum of the angles of a
spherical triangle is greater than 180°.[8] Book II of Sphaerica applies spherical geometry to
Later, Claudius Ptolemy expanded on Chords in a Circle in his work Almagest. The Almagest is
primarily a work on astronomy, and astronomy relies on trigonometry. Ptolemy also discovered
India also plays an important part in trigonometry. In the fourth and fifth century, there
were written some important mathematical works, the Siddhantas. These literary works defined
the relationship between an angle and the chord, and defined sine, cosine, and inverse sine.
Mathematician, Madhava paved the way for the analysis of trigonometric functions and their
infinite series expansions. He developed the concepts of the power series and Taylor series, and
produced the power series expansions of sine, cosine, tangent, and arctangent. He also gave the
functions. His works were expanded by his followers at the Kerala School up to the 16th century.
was after this development in Islamic mathematics that "the first real trigonometry emerged, in
the sense that only then did the object of study become the spherical or plane triangle, its sides
and angles." In the early 9th century AD, Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī ,a pioneer in
spherical trigonometry, made sine and cosine tables, and the first table of tangents. In 830 AD,
Habash al-Hasib al-Marwazi produced the first table of cotangents. Muhammad ibn Jābir al-
Harrānī al-Battānī discovered the reciprocal functions of secant and cosecant, and produced the
first table of cosecants for each degree from 1° to 90°. By the 10th century AD, Muslim
Although the Chinese excelled in other fields of mathematics such as geometry and
complex algebraic formulas, trigonometry was not as widely studied as in the earlier Greek,
Hellenistic, Indian and Islamic worlds. Instead, the early Chinese used an empirical substitute
known as chong cha, for the use of plane trigonometry in using the sine, the tangent, and the
secant were known. However, this state of lack of trigonometry in China slowly began to change
during the Song Dynasty, where Chinese mathematicians began to express greater emphasis for
the need of spherical trigonometry in calendrical science and astronomical calculations. Shen
Kuo used trigonometric functions to solve the mathematical problems of chords and arcs. he
created an approximation of the arc s of a circle given the diameter d, sagitta v, and length c of
the chord subtending the arc, the length of which he approximated as s=c+(2v2)/2. Sal Restivo
writes that Shen's work in the lengths of arcs of circles provided the basis for spherical
trigonometry developed in the 13th century by the mathematician and astronomer Guo Shoujing.
As we can see, trigonometry took many years and many different cultures to form into
the wonderful subject we know today. From ancient cultures Greek, Hellenistic, Indian, Arabs, to
modern western life, trigonometry has been a long journey. It is not only a class you take
because you need it to graduate, trigonometry is a logical way of looking at the world that has
Source List
• Toomer, Gerald J. (1998). Ptolemy's Almagest. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-00260-6
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