¶ Trigonometry: Spherical Trigonometry (1)
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Index Entry
Trigonometry: Spherical Trigonometry:
“Many of you have been exposed to the trigonometry and it seemed really to be the first kind of difficult phase to kids in school because they came to words that didn’t seem familiar. A line and a face sound familiar, but you got into some Greek words and you got into sine, cosine, tangent, cotangent and so forth, and you said I don’t know what these are and then you said, Show it to me. They couldn’t show it to you because it is a ratio. That was annoying to you to have a ratio. . . I can give you a very good case of a ratio that you are familiar with that doesn’t give you trouble. . . A knot is a ratio of miles and hours. . . . But the trouble was that all those functions of the angles, they were Greek words and a very upsetting thing. The trigonometry showed us ways of dealing in edges and angles. One of the things that made you kind of upset was that you were rationing an angle to an edge, and that was something like rationing cows to moons and you are not really sure that they fit together.”
¶ Citations
- Oregon Lecture #7, pp. 271-271. 11 Jul’62
