Trigonometric Functions - History

History

While the early study of trigonometry can be traced to antiquity, the trigonometric functions as they are in use today were developed in the medieval period. The chord function was discovered by Hipparchus of Nicaea (180–125 BC) and Ptolemy of Roman Egypt (90–165 AD).

The functions sine and cosine can be traced to the jyā and koti-jyā functions used in Gupta period Indian astronomy (Aryabhatiya, Surya Siddhanta), via translation from Sanskrit to Arabic and then from Arabic to Latin.

All six trigonometric functions in current use were known in Islamic mathematics by the 9th century, as was the law of sines, used in solving triangles. al-Khwārizmī produced tables of sines, cosines and tangents. They were studied by authors including Omar Khayyám, Bhāskara II, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, Jamshīd al-Kāshī (14th century), Ulugh Beg (14th century), Regiomontanus (1464), Rheticus, and Rheticus' student Valentinus Otho

Madhava of Sangamagrama (c. 1400) made early strides in the analysis of trigonometric functions in terms of infinite series.

The first published use of the abbreviations 'sin', 'cos', and 'tan' is by the 16th century French mathematician Albert Girard.

In a paper published in 1682, Leibniz proved that sin x is not an algebraic function of x.

Leonhard Euler's Introductio in analysin infinitorum (1748) was mostly responsible for establishing the analytic treatment of trigonometric functions in Europe, also defining them as infinite series and presenting "Euler's formula", as well as the near-modern abbreviations sin., cos., tang., cot., sec., and cosec.

A few functions were common historically, but are now seldom used, such as the chord (crd(θ) = 2 sin(θ/2)), the versine (versin(θ) = 1 − cos(θ) = 2 sin2(θ/2)) (which appeared in the earliest tables ), the haversine (haversin(θ) = versin(θ) / 2 = sin2(θ/2)), the exsecant (exsec(θ) = sec(θ) − 1) and the excosecant (excsc(θ) = exsec(π/2 − θ) = csc(θ) − 1). Many more relations between these functions are listed in the article about trigonometric identities.

Etymologically, the word sine derives from the Sanskrit word for half the chord, jya-ardha, abbreviated to jiva. This was transliterated in Arabic as jiba, written jb, vowels not being written in Arabic. Next, this transliteration was mis-translated in the 12th century into Latin as sinus, under the mistaken impression that jb stood for the word jaib, which means "bosom" or "bay" or "fold" in Arabic, as does sinus in Latin. Finally, English usage converted the Latin word sinus to sine. The word tangent comes from Latin tangens meaning "touching", since the line touches the circle of unit radius, whereas secant stems from Latin secans — "cutting" — since the line cuts the circle.