Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

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The problem is this. Using compass and ruler constructions there is a set of angles you can construct, and you can calculate sin and cos for those angles. You can even write the values for those out explicitly. However no part of this construction sheds light on how to find sin and cos for angles that you don't know how to construct. Or even gives good intuition that no matter how you do it, you can define it in a way that makes sense for all angles.

In fact we draw a picture, people look at it, and their intuition tells them that things will work out. Very few students will notice the logical gaps.

But to close the logical gaps, you need to start with Calculus first, and then derive trig formulas from that.

(Yes, I'm aware of the history here. Euclid presented trig reasonably rigorously a very long time before Calculus. Newton invented Calculus in the 1600s, and then used it as a heuristic to figure out answers that he then rederived using trig in The Principia. Leibniz reinvented Calculus in part based on inspiration from Newton's work. None of this was made formally correct until the late 1800s.)

(I have no opinion on pedagogical arguments about which is best to present first. I believe that we present trig first as a holdover from a curriculum where The Elements was the standard textbook until very recently.)

Well... you can use the half-angle formulas and the angle addition formulas to calculate sin and cos for angles that are arbitrarily close to the ones that you want. Add to that the idea that sin and cos must be continuous (I consider that intuitively obvious from a unit circle, but I don't know how to make that argument rigorous), and you can start to interpolate. You can in fact use these methods to calculate sin and cos for an arbitrary angle to any desired degree of precision... if you have the patience. It will be shorter to use the series derived from calculus, I'll admit.

I do not believe that there is an argument for continuity without starting with Calculus. Certainly starting from ruler and compass constructions it is not obvious.

That said, if you have enough Calculus to define how to measure the arclength of a segment of the circle, you can quickly prove that sin and cos in radians exist, have a nice power series, and so on.

It is like x^y with x positive. We can manually define it every rational y. But the easiest way to get a rigorous and straightforward definition is to prove the algebraic properties of the integral of 1/x, use that to define the logarithm, define its inverse function to be the exponential, prove its algebraic properties, then define x^y as e^(y*log(x)). And it all just works.

It's easy to show more or less directly (by comparing arclength to straight-line length), and certainly without calculus, that the absolute difference between sin(x + delta) and sin(x) is at most |delta|.

You're right. And ditto for cos(x+delta) vs cos(x).

Of course that assumes that arclength is well-defined. The standard approach to which is, of course, Calculus.

Replying really late, just in case anybody reads this. (I went on vacation, and this occurred to me then.)

If you don't have calculus, you don't have anything like a delta-epsilon proof of continuity. But without calculus, you also don't know that you need it. So you just assume (correctly) that you can interpolate, and it works just like you expect, and life goes on.

There's a topological direction... but I have to agree that calculus is much more conceptually immediate to humans anyway.

But even a disembodied being of pure reason might eventually discover continuity via logic->topology.

As young students, we are taught that these functions are ratios of sides on right angles. It is fairly intuitive for them that provided they can draw a right triangle, they just need to measure the sides. And it is easy to accept that someone computed sines and cosines for a lot of angles and put it in a table. My point being, that we didn't need (in the past) calculus to compute trigonometric functions, and I don't see how it is a burden for students to be introduced to those functions without the Calculus definition.

And the reality is, that the definition of sine as a ratio of the catheti and hypotenuse is a rigorous definition of the function. Strictly, this sine is different from the sine of calculus. The first, the sine from Euclidean geometry, assigns a real to pair of rays, while the calculus sine, is function from the real numbers to the reals. And it does take some work to link them formally.

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