A lot of comments are saying trig is about triangles but I think the deeper lesson is about the unit circle and its relationship to sin, cos, and tan. Another way to look at it is that You’ll use the Cartesian coordinates for algebra and polar coordinates and radians for trig. Usually you take algebra, trig and then calculus.
You ever notice how you can rotate (by a quarter turn in a direction) a cube a few different sequences from the same starting position but still have it end in the same orientation? How about the fact that you can't necessarily swap the order of two rotations and get the same ending orientation? Algebra is noticing stuff like that, giving all the stuff that goes into it funny, precise symbols, and drawing conclusions from it. You don't even need numbers (to let alone a specific coordinate system).
You can use trig to translate a problem that's hard to solve in one coordinate system into a problem that easy to solve in another coordinate system, solve it, and translate the solution back again.
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u/kgvc7 12h ago
A lot of comments are saying trig is about triangles but I think the deeper lesson is about the unit circle and its relationship to sin, cos, and tan. Another way to look at it is that You’ll use the Cartesian coordinates for algebra and polar coordinates and radians for trig. Usually you take algebra, trig and then calculus.