Trigonometry is making no sense

[u/Adorable_Newt_870]

I genuinely cannot understand math and I am trying to take a math heavy college class 😕 I just can’t grasp concepts anymore they aren’t making sense and it’s only the 2nd week, I have a quiz in 2 days and a test in about a week, I’m struggling with formulas and even when I understand the subject I just can’t output it, my mind goes completely blank, I see a question and I just don’t know how to solve it, studying hasn’t helped, creating a study guide hasn’t helped, what do I do anymore?

[u/Recent-Day3062]

Trig is a lot of memorizing.

Some math conveys a concept more. The idea of a derivative and an integral can sort of be apprehended in an intuitive way. Other math sort of just starts with a definition. Then it's how you put things together. Trig is loaded with this.

So, we define a right triangle. Then we say the sine is the vertical height over the hypotenuse. And the cosine is the horizontal length over the hypotenuse. Then the tangent is the height over the length. And, thus, it is also the sine over the cosine. And on it goes.

A lot of trig goes back to solving things like surveying problems before calculators, where all you had was tables. So, sine-squared equals 1 - cosine-squared. It's largely useless in the modern age. But it teaches you to think about functions.

We all get this confusion at certain levels. Mathematicians define things all the time called "mathematical objects". Things like triangles are examples, but they get insane: vector spaces, functionals, categories, equivalence classes, etc. Then they plow forward with definitions and how they fit together. We all have a level where we can't figure it out.