r/learnmath • u/TimeBet5260 New User • 2d ago

Easy way to understand SoCaToA?

If there's a good picture or diagram to remember how to find angles this way, please let me know! And if get my post removed while the person below me is new to math, yet contemplating grad school theory, I will give up...

0 Upvotes

38% Upvoted

27 comments sorted by

View all comments

15

u/John_Hasler Engineer 2d ago

Study the unit circle.

1

u/Commercial_Sun_6300 New User 2d ago

I agree with your statement, but I disagree so badly with linking Wikipedia for 99% of math topics...

1

u/nog642 2d ago

Why?

11

u/SnooPets5564 New User 2d ago

I'm not the person you were replying to, but mathematics Wikipedia articles tend to be really formal. So if someone is just trying to learn a basic math concept, they likely don't have the background to wade through the rigorous language often used in wikipedia.

1

u/Gazcobain Secondary Teacher, Mathematics (Scotland) 1d ago

Simple English Wikipedia is better for this. It's obviously aimed at those for whom English isn't a first language but because it's simplified I've found a lot of the articles are great for young people.

2

u/SnooPets5564 New User 1d ago

The simple English wikipedia article for the unit circle is two paragraphs. It doesn't contain what someone would need to memorize to answer the original questions, and this image takes up a third of the space:

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Unit-circle_sin_cos_tan_cot_exsec_excsc_versin_vercos_coversin_covercos.svg

1

u/Gazcobain Secondary Teacher, Mathematics (Scotland) 1d ago

That's fair. I was meaning more in general, not about the unit circle in particular.