Fundamentals of Trigs

Unit circle

Trigs is about the relationships of the sides and angles in a triangle, therefore it might not be
intuitive to think of “unit circle” as a fundamental of the topic. But going forward, it would
make more and more sense.

In a unit circle, the radius is 1. This is because 1 is easy to operate with, like 8 divided by 1 is
8.

The following circle will demonstrate cos and sin

y axis

0 1 1
. 0.7
8 5 X
4 0 0 a
. . xi
4 5 s

Since the radius is 1,

For the triangle in the 1st quadrant, cos(theta) = 0.5/1 = 0.5
As you can see, cos is about the x values.

sin(theta) = 0.75/1 = 0.75

And sin is about the y values.
In trigonometry, the coordinate matters, which is why based on the diagram above, cos on
the 1st quadrant is 0.5, but cos of the same triangle but on the second quadrant will be -0.5.
Both are 0.5 because they are the same triangle ( same size, same length, same
everything ) but with different coordinates.

tan is about the rate of change of y to x, which is equivalent to sin/cos.

So for the first quadrant, the tan is just 0.75/0.5.

Unit circle is easy to understand trigonometry as hypotenuse is simply 1, which allows ease
of operation, and we can actually visualise any possible triangle by using different quadrants
to visualize.