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Re: Sine and Cosine Accuracy


Scott Robert Ladd <scott.ladd@coyotegulch.com> writes:

| Gabriel Dos Reis wrote:
| > Scott Robert Ladd <scott.ladd@coyotegulch.com> writes:
| > | I've never quite understood the necessity for performing trig operations
| > | on excessively large values, but perhaps my problem domain hasn't
| > | included such applications.
| > 
| > The world is flat; I never quite understood the necessity of spherical
| > trigonometry.
| 
| For many practical problems, the world can be considered flat.

Wooho.

| And I do
| plenty of spherical geometry (GPS navigation) without requiring the sin
| of 2**90. ;)

Yeah, the problem with people who work only with angles is that they
tend to forget that sin (and friends) are defined as functions on
*numbers*, not just angles or whatever, and happen to appear in
approximations of functions as series (e.g. Fourier series) and therefore
those functions can be applied to things that are not just "angles". 

-- Gaby


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