Cotangent, Secant, Cosecant?!!
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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If it's of any help/interest, my favorite Trig mnemonic was "Soak a Toe", i.e. SOH CAH TOA, meaning:
Sine=Opposite/Hypotenuse [SOH]
Cosine=Adjacent/Hypotenuse [CAH]
Tangent=Opposite/Adjacent [TOA]
(Now I just hope I got that right -- that's all strictly from memory...) :)
As for actually USING these things... hey, I was a Computer Science major. I never *DID* understand why advanced math was supposed to be required in order to type instructions on a screen, and observe the results.
(LOGIC, on the other hand, would be *HIGHLY* useful to programmers -- and therefore, wasn't required at all. I took all three Logic courses anyway, as electives, because I *WANTED* to...)
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