Alternatively, you could be this guy.
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 sin everyday.
cos i have to
tan I go to bed
Use them all the time as a mechanical engineer
I don’t think I’ve ever used them.
In HS trig class I asked the teacher what was the actual logic behind the tan function, and she said “well it’s just programmed into your calculator” and I said I realized that but how did it work, she told me to go ask the AP calc teacher.
I use
lerp()and d3.js so I don’t have to use any of this shit.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.
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.
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
That’s where math starts getting spicy though!
You gain a new appreciation for logarithms when you do statistics.
Apparently, they didn’t know it by heart. If they had, they wouldn’t have had to spend all that time searching.
No such luck as a physics prof :/
did you know 1209 is a prime number? or maybe not, I’m just a cat :3
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.
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.
Math shit is universal
humanlanguageMath shit is universal
humanlanguage. True.But the language part of it is pretty human.
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.
I think that’s a leap, because my brother play game but still dumb. In fact, brother dumb because of game.
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
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…
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!
Damn, I’ve been trying but I keep relapsing
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
I.e. day 1209 of not doing anything useful or being a poet. Are you a poet?
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
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.”
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
