Who Is The Founding Father Of Trigonometry

When you ask somebody about what subject do they appreciate most in school, the answer is, most of the time, Art, Music, English, … Rarely do you ever see Mathematics as an answer. Perhaps, pure laziness or incapable instructors are the problems. According to Awasthi, students feel like they are being imprisoned in an environment where, due to tedious teachings and ignorance, they believe that these kinds of subjects are not required in their future career choices. Some can even say that learning about math is just doing a ridiculous “number of tests, quizzes, homework and projects” (Awasthi). However, mathematic is not meant to be just numbers and how to find them; It is a branch where the human brain is being developed through the process

But what about math on higher education? Like trigonometry and calculus; where the use of such complex formulas and patterns are hardly ever seen in basic daily tasks. If we were to look back at the origin of these branches of mathematic, we can see how and why they were invented. Starting with trigonometry, the study of triangles and their relations. The founding father of trigonometry were the ancient Greeks, who has developed a way to calculate and master the art of astronomy; It was Hipparchus, Menelaus, and Ptolomy who were known to had enlightened the world with Greek trigonometry (Note that there were other contributors, but it seems that there were few to none records of them). Since there were many questions about the stars and the Earth, early trigonometry begins mostly with spherical trigonometry. That wasn’t until it went through a tremendous process of tables of angles that the term trigonometry became official in the second A.D. century

This may seem true to some cases since most people just take things for granted. The main theme here is that people tend to not use logic to solve their problems but expect high rewards. Math back then may seem like just a solution to a few extraordinary problems, but with hundreds of years of improvement, it is now a part of almost everything in your daily lives. For example, you are a music major with the hopes of becoming a music production; you would not think that math is relevant. However, trigonometry plays an important role in the sound quality and editing for the music. To go more in-depth, sound waves pattern are represented “graphically by sine and cosine functions. A single note can be modeled on a sine curve, and a chord can be modeled with multiple since curves used in conjunction with one another” (Ben-Jacob). And these are translated into graphs which the computers use to translate them into pitch and sound effects. Not only that trigonometry has its functions in other industries as well: correct correlation for weight loads and bridge strength in architecture, modeling “the flow and change of direction” using sine function, sizing automobiles components for safety in manufacturing, … (Beach). The other branch of math, calculus,