Has anyone run into the Cotangent or Secant or Cosecant functions since learning them in High School? Does anyone use them for anything? I do seem to remember a few mentions from calculus that fussed about secants, but why do we have special names for these things ( Read more... )

Here's a li'l story from back when I was a tenured (10-yeared) grad student, illustrating the importance of a particular Good Student Survival Skill. [Excerpted from a comment I made else-LJ]Many years ago, in grad school, I took a grad-level math class for my minor -- the first grad-level math class I'd ever taken. It was "Applied Algebra"[*], ( Read more... )