Intro to Trignometry

While the pythagorean theorem can give us a third side as long as we know the other 2 sides, we do not always have the luxury of knowing the other 2 sides in many real world situations.

For example, say you were flying a kite, with a 100ft string, and you needed to figure out how high up it is.

In cases like this, it becomes very difficult to get measurements for 2 sides. As a result, we need a new way of finding the length of a side, given only one side.

Lets start by drawing out a righ triangle, and drawing out its sides and angles. Playing around with the graph below, you may see a pattern in the ratios of the sides, given that one of the angles in the triangle is fixed.

For any angle in a right triangle, we can see that the side lengths remain in the same ratio, despite the scale of the triangle. We can give these ratios special names, , , and .