Timeline for Is there a way to describe oscillations without referencing trigonometry?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
12 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jan 29, 2021 at 23:18 | comment | added | Bill N | @GiorgioP Where have I said it's a matter of opinion? I have not. See the :) in my comment. In fact, I upvoted your answer earlier because I truly appreciate the discussion of basis functions. Trigonometric is probably the simplest to introduce, but indeed complex exponentials are isomorphic to trig, as are proper power series. I do think it's humorous that some answers don't mention other harmonic functions. The choice of which basis to use is a matter of opinion as to ease of a solution. | |
| Jan 29, 2021 at 17:32 | comment | added | GiorgioP-DoomsdayClockIsAt-90 | @BillN, I have a hard time understanding how the answer to this question could be considered opinion based. I still stay on the old "math is not an opinion". | |
| Jan 28, 2021 at 16:14 | comment | added | Triatticus | @BillN certainly from our point of view that's true, but for most people a complex exponential certainly would make their work more complicated. I don't disagree with that point as the commplex exponential was one of the coolest things I remember first learning about. | |
| Jan 28, 2021 at 14:48 | review | Close votes | |||
| Jan 30, 2021 at 0:22 | |||||
| Jan 28, 2021 at 14:43 | comment | added | TBissinger | There is a beautiful video by 3blue1brown on youtube, "But what is the Fourier Transform? A visual introduction." It doesn't talk about other function bases to describe periodic functions (as descirbed in GiorgioP's answer), but it motivates the omnipresence of the Fourier transform from a very non-trigonometric point of view. I always recommend it to my students, maybe you will also find it worthwhile. youtube.com/watch?v=spUNpyF58BY | |
| Jan 28, 2021 at 12:43 | comment | added | garyp | The conflict might go away if you consider sin and cos to be circular functions and get rid of "trigonometry" and it's implied connection to triangles. | |
| Jan 28, 2021 at 8:49 | answer | added | GiorgioP-DoomsdayClockIsAt-90 | timeline score: 3 | |
| Jan 28, 2021 at 4:49 | comment | added | Bill N | @Triatticus Or maybe trig is complex exponentials in disguise, but we insist that plane geometry is more fundamental and ignore the reality of $i^2=-1$ :) | |
| Jan 28, 2021 at 4:22 | answer | added | xXx_69_SWAG_69_xXx | timeline score: 3 | |
| Jan 28, 2021 at 4:13 | comment | added | polytheneman | @Triatticus So there's no escaping trigonometry? | |
| Jan 28, 2021 at 3:49 | comment | added | Triatticus | Suppose you could just use complex exponentials all the time but it's really just trig in disguise. | |
| Jan 28, 2021 at 3:39 | history | asked | polytheneman | CC BY-SA 4.0 |