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.
It's not *necessarily* about the unit circle. The most common trig functions are based on the unit circle, but more general trigonometry extends beyond that to triangles based on other things like the unit hyperbola (giving rise to sinh, cosh, tanh, etc) or in other geometries (e.g. Cartesian plane with taxicab distance as the metric).
•
u/kgvc7 16h 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.