Friday, October 23, 2009

Here's Your Angle Sum Identity for Sine (and Cosine)

I intend for this to be the last spit of trig proofs for a while. After this post, we'll have the tools we need to start working on derivatives. Specifically, we're going to work out how to expand and .

Once again, we're employing our now familiar unit circle:

You'll notice I have a fair amount of mark up on there. It seems messy, and there may vary well be an easier way to do it, but this was the way I did it, and it makes sense to me. So, we'll start like always with what we know about the problem:

There are also some things we can infer about the diagram:

  • is a right angle meaning


Now we're ready to begin expanding our identities. Starting with :
We'll start by finding the value for :
  • Simplifying, we get:
We're halfway there. Now we have to find :

Simplifying again, we get:


So:


So, there's that. Time to move on to . Much like with , we'll be using a divide and conquer approach.


So, starting with :

  • Thinking back to our days of SOHCAHTOA we know that
  • We also know that and (from our previous proof)
  • So,
  • Simplifying we get:

Again, we find ourselves halfway there. Now we need to find :

  • We know
  • We know from our previous example that
  • This tells us
  • Expanding using our previous proofs we get
  • Simplifying we get
  • Now we put it all together:

So, we can now use the following two identities:

Thus, we close the book on trig for a while.

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