Terraria Community Forums

The person who invented trigonometry committed the greatest sin() in the history of mankind

I oughtta tan() your hide for that pun.

Trigonometry is pretty tough to get used to, though. So many imaginary triangles... you'd think that you were trying to confirm the Illuminati or something.

That's why I decided to say " it," and decided to see exactly how much trig I really needed in the real world... after I finish college.

You'd be surprised. Trigonometry is a basic requirement for almost every technical field, especially engineering. Physicists would be screwed without it, and it even makes appearances in biology. I remember having to improvise some trigonometry for a programming exercise I did a while back.
Mathematics is the language of nature. Learn it well, and it will be your for the rest of your life.

I'm all too aware, thanks to a particularly technical bit of modding I've been working on. At one point, I did understand trig, but my teacher was very fond of learning by rote, which didn't really work for me, so I forgot. Anyway, I am entering a mathematics-heavy field (Video Game Development) so when I have to, I'll learn it.

You can't learn ANYTHING by rote. Not even vocabulary. That's the worst way to attempt to learn anything. It fails every time.

The best way to learn trigonometry is to use it to do something meaningful, straight away. Like in a physics problem. For instance, let's say you had a cannon firing a cannonball at a 37 degree angle to the horizon, at 50 m/s...

Careful where you're aiming that. Anyway, like I said, I hope to be using it frequently enough to eventually learn it properly.

...so you know it's moving horizontally at 50 cos(37) meters per second, which is roughly 40 m/s. All you need to know is the time it spent in the air before it hit the ground again. There's an equation for that, but it requires the initial velocity in the vertical direction. Luckily, we know it to be 50 sin(37) m/s. Trigonometry. That works out to be 30 m/s.