Trigonometry is a branch concerned with specific functions of angles and their

application to calculations. There are six functions of an angle commonly used in

trigonometry. Their names and abbreviations are sine (sin), cosine (cos), tangent
(tan), cotangent (cot), secant (sec), and cosecant (csc).

The first trigonometric table was apparently compiled by Hipparchus of Nicaea

(180 – 125 BCE), who is now consequently known as "the father of trigonometry."
Hipparchus was the first to tabulate the corresponding values of arc and chord for a
series of angles. He considered every triangle—planar or spherical—as being
inscribed in a circle, so that each side becomes a chord (that is, a straight line that
connects two points on a curve or surface, as shown by the inscribed triangle ABC
in the figure). As an astronomer, Hipparchus was mainly interested in spherical
triangles, such as the imaginary triangle formed by three stars on the celestial
sphere, but he was also familiar with the basic formulas of plane trigonometry.
The ancient Egyptians and Babylonians had known of theorems on the ratios of the
sides of similar triangles for many centuries. There is, however, much debate as to
whether it is a table of Pythagorean triples, a solution of quadratic equations, or a
trigonometric table. The Egyptians, on the other hand, used a primitive form of
trigonometry for building pyramids in the 2nd millennium BC. A seasonal cycle of
roughly 360 days could have corresponded to the signs and decans of the zodiac by
dividing each sign into thirty parts and each decan into ten parts. 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
Ancient Greek and Hellenistic mathematicians made use of the chord. Although
there is no trigonometry in the works of Euclid and Archimedes, in the strict sense
of the word, there are theorems presented in a geometric way (rather than a
trigonometric way) that are equivalent to specific trigonometric laws or formulas.
Although it is not known when the systematic use of the 360° circle came into
mathematics, it is known that the systematic introduction of the 360° circle came a
little after Aristarchus of Samos composed On the Sizes and Distances of the Sun
and Moon, since he measured an angle in terms of a fraction of a quadrant.
Menelaus of Alexandria (ca. 100 AD) wrote in three books his Sphaerica. In Book
I, he established a basis for spherical triangles analogous to the Euclidean basis for
plane triangles. He established a theorem that is without Euclidean analogue, that
two spherical triangles are congruent if corresponding angles are equal, but he did
not distinguish between congruent and symmetric spherical triangles. Another
theorem that he establishes is that the sum of the angles of a spherical triangle is
greater than 180°. Book II of Sphaerica applies spherical geometry to astronomy.
And Book III contains the "theorem of Menelaus". He further gave his famous
"rule of six quantities".
Claudius Ptolemy (ca. 90 – ca. 168 AD) expanded upon Hipparchus' Chords in a
Circle in his Almagest, or the Mathematical Syntaxis. The Almagest is primarily a
work on astronomy, and astronomy relies on trigonometry. A theorem that was
central to Ptolemy's calculation of chords was what is still known today as
Ptolemy's theorem, that the sum of the products of the opposite sides of a cyclic
quadrilateral is equal to the product of the diagonals.