Secular Elation

Oh, regarding CAST, our teacher made us learn that by "all students take calculus," in counter-clockwise fashion, starting from the first quadrant.

Well, since I made this post, I have studied it a bit more, and I think it is clicking in my mind (a little bit). The funny thing is, if I pass this class (this course is for summer school, since it is of course summer), I'll be in AP Calculus as a senior in high school.

But, you see, I can do some calculus, including basic derivatives and integrals. Now, I'm sure the trigonometry unit of calculus class will be a crazy one.

Island3

Horrible....pun....eyes.....burning!!!

NeilUnreal

Bizarre coincidence! I'm currently trapped in the jungles of finding efficient C++ algorithms for two-dimensional collision detection for a simulation I'm writing*. Nearly all the literature discusses 3D collision detection and I'm thinking the most efficient 2D algorithms must be simpler than degenerate 3D tests with Z=0. <img src="graemlins/banghead.gif" border="0" alt="[Bang Head]" />

-NeilUnreal

*i.e. "Tricks of the Trade"

Skepticwithachainsaw

I share your pain mate, Trigonometry gave me an enormous amount of grief during my A-level Maths course. (I'm English). Luckily I finally managed to get the hang of it days before my Pure 2 retake last Tuesday.

I think one of the worst things about it is there is no easy way of "visualising" what dy/dx [6cos²3x + 9sin³2x] or whatever could "look" like.

My only advice is to practice (past papers in my case) and make a conscious effort to remember stuff like the double and half-angle formulee, (one method which sort of worked for me is going through it for a few minutes before you go to sleep,… providing your not drunk or with your boy/girlfriend or something… )

It should finally click, and when it finally does it becomes quite a good method for getting easy marks

Baptist Vine

I know what you're saying about spherical trig. I had to study spherical trig and spherical astronomy for a surveying course where we had to calculate lattitude and longitude from astronomical measurements on sun and polaris. In geomatics programs spherical trig is still studied as background to GPS.

It took a lot of get your head around it, but it was really neat once you started to make your way.

fando

Whoops, my bad. By the way, did you know that in higher math, the meaning of the word geometry becomes something that invokes nightmares among us poor students? It's no longer about finding volumes of simple shapes.

Claudia

Yes, when it begins to involve conoids or hyperbolic paraboloids,,,

ohwilleke

I taught myself trig, and thought that it was fairly fun -- you are always jumping from the algebraic version of the world to the geometric version.

I also recall a cute proof in calculus or first year physics that the hyperbolic cosine function (aka a catenery) is the natural shape of a hanging cable in a gravitational field.