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
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I'm told they also have applications in electrical engineering, but I can't say I've ever seen that use directly.
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Strangely enough, the hyperbolic functions were used a lot in my graduate transport class, usually when solving second-order differential equations.
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one very nice example already:
By the geometry of their construction, cylindrical projections stretch distances east-west. The amount of stretch is the same at any chosen latitude on all cylindrical projections, and is given by the secant of the latitude as a multiple of the equator's scale.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map_projection
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