helping granddaughter with math homework

[--Pete]

Hi,

Or memorize the Taylor expansions, they're not very complicated for sin and cos.

No need to memorize them, they're easy enough to generate. But, do you know how many terms you have to calculate to get even 1% accuracy? That's why they're not used in practice.

Oh, and by the way, that 'sin(x) ~ x for small x' is true only if x is expressed in radians. I've never seen a protractor calibrated in radians, and 180/pi is a pita. I can't begin to tell you how many lab students screwed up the pendulum lab by missing that point.

--Pete