Quotes & Sayings About Trigonometry

You were contemplating the mountain, Mr. Conway?" Came the inquiry.
"Yes, it's a fine sight. It has a name, I suppose?"
"It is called Karakal"
"I don't think I've ever heard of it. Is is very high?"
"Over twenty-eight thousand feet."
"Indeed? I didn't realize there would be anything on that scale outside the Himalayas. Has it been properly surveyed? Whose are the measurements?"
"Whose would you expect, my dear sir? Is there anything incompatible between monasticism and trigonometry? — James Hilton

Maths is at only one remove from magic. — Neel Burton

There was a steady drizzle when they left for the tower. Moist drove the cart, with the others sitting on the load behind him and bickering over trigonometry. Moist tried not to listen; he got lost when maths started to get silly. — Terry Pratchett

It feels a bit like high school, only with guns and uniforms, and instead of learning trigonometry or North American history, we learn better ways to kill people and blow up their stuff. — Marko Kloos

What was magic, after all, but something that happened at the snap of a finger? Where was the magic in that? It was mumbled words and weird drawings in old books, and in the wrong hands it was as dangerous as hell, but not one half as dangerous as it could be in the right hands. The universe was full of the stuff; it made the stars stay up and the feet stay down.

But what was happening now . . . this was magical. Ordinary men had dreamed it up and put it together, building towers on rafts in swamps and across the frozen spines of mountains. They'd cursed and, worse, used logarithms. They'd waded through rivers and dabbled in trigonometry. They hadn't dreamed, in the way people usually used the word, but they'd imagined a different world, and bent metal around it. And out of all the sweat and swearing and mathematics had come this . . . thing, dropping words across the world as softly as starlight. — Terry Pratchett

At the Stourbridge Fair in 1663, at age twenty, he purchased a book on astrology, "out of a curiosity to see what there was in it." He read it until he came to an illustration which he could not understand, because he was ignorant of trigonometry. So he purchased a book on trigonometry but soon found himself unable to follow the geometrical arguments. So he found a copy of Euclid's Elements of Geometry, and began to read. Two years later he invented the differential calculus. — Carl Sagan

I was trying to unravel the complicated trigonometry of the radical thought that silence could make up the greatest lie ever told. — Pat Conroy

Our eyes met in the math class. How were we to know that trigonometry would lead to matrimony? — Sophie Kinsella

The beginning of Christendom, is, strictly, at a point out of time. A metphysical trigonometry finds it among the spiritual Secrets, at the meeting of two heavenward lines, one drawn from Bethany along the Ascent of the Messias, the other from Jerusalem against the Descent of the Paraclete. That measurement, the measurement of eternity in operation, of the bright cloud and the rushing wind, is, in effect, theology. — Charles Williams

I was not allowed to take spherical trigonometry because I'd sprained my ankle. Because I'd sprained my ankle, I had an incomplete in gym, phys ed. And the rule was that if you had an incomplete in anything, you were not allowed to take an overload. — William Shockley

She can tell you the height of the attacker from the trigonometry of the blood spatter, while I'm fuzzy on what trigonometry is. — Ilona Andrews

She beams at me and it's almost enough to make up for the fact that I'm harder than trigonometry right now. Almost. — Trish Doller

Though blessed with the enviable properties of a mink coat - graceful, unreasonable, and impractical no matter what she was draped over - she was nevertheless one of those people whose personality proved to be the bane of modern mathematicians. She was neither a flat nor solid shape. She showed no symmetry at all. Trigonometry, Calculus and Statistics all proved useless. Her Pie Chart was a muddle of arbitrary wedges, her Line Graph, the silhouette of the Alps. And just when one listed her under Chaos Theory - Butterfly Effects, Weather Predictions, Fractals, Bifurcation diagrams and whatnot - she showed up as an equilateral triangle, sometimes even a square. — Marisha Pessl

Most people of my grandparents' generation had an intuitive sense of agricultural basics ... This knowledge has vanished from our culture.
We also have largely convinced ourselves it wasn't too important. Consider how many Americans might respond to a proposal that agriculture was to become a mandatory subject in all schools ... A fair number of parents would get hot under the collar to see their kids' attention being pulled away from the essentials of grammar, the all-important trigonometry, to make room for down-on-the-farm stuff. The baby boom psyche embraces a powerful presumption that education is a key to moving away from manual labor and dirt
two undeniable ingredients of farming. It's good enough for us that somebody, somewhere, knows food production well enough to serve the rest of us with all we need to eat, each day of our lives. — Barbara Kingsolver

I've sort of been slacking off in my voodoo studies.I've trigonometry, you know? — Kendare Blake

I'm an artist; I'm not going to use trigonometry. — Taylor Momsen

What are the chances that this first and only smart species in the history of life on Earth has enough smarts to completely figure out how the universe works? Chimpanzees are an evolutionary hair's-width from us yet we can agree that no amount of tutelage will ever leave a chimp fluent in trigonometry. Now imagine a species on Earth, or anywhere else, as smart compared with humans as humans are compared with chimpanzees. How much of the universe might they figure out? — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The pyramidal design parameter (i.e., 33 PI) on the Giza Plateau transcends from the terrestrial plane into that of the celestial by the exponential process of raising it to the power of four. As magnified above, so diminished exponentially by four below. And yet, reducing it exponentially furthermore by four, makes it recede into trigonometry and geometry. — Ibrahim Ibrahim

The old woman was not only ugly with the ugliness age brings us all but showed signs of formidable ugliness by birth - pickle-jar chin, mainsail ears and a nose like a trigonometry problem. What's more, she had the deep frown and snit wrinkles that come from a lifetime of bad character. — P. J. O'Rourke

Nothing, I have decided, could waste precious life more than trigonometry and logarithms. — Morrissey

I'm excited about going back to 'Today,' but, at odd moments, I'll grit my teeth in anxiety. I feel like a student before the start of school. I've got my new shoes and my book bag, but I'm not sure I'll remember how to do trigonometry. During my maternity leave, I haven't used many words of more than one syllable. — Jane Pauley

In such a wild, uncharted place the book of God was vital, for it nourished their spirit and laid boundaries for their conduct. Other subjects simply had no relevance. Trigonometry and calculus would not help them find their way among the mountain trails. Adam Smith's economics were of no consequence in the matter of planting corn and breeding cattle. Nor did they need the essays of Plato or the plays of Shakespeare to teach them how to shoot a rifle, or to make clothes from animal skins, or to clear away the wilderness with their own bare hands. — James Webb

Pi is not merely the ubiquitous factor in high school geometry problems; it is stitched across the whole tapestry of mathematics, not just geometry's little corner of it. Pi occupies a key place in trigonometry too. It is intimately related to e, and to imaginary numbers. Pi even shows up in the mathematics of probability — Robert Kanigel

Andrew Hacker argues that algebra and trigonometry and calculus are subjects that almost nobody used after they graduate, and so why should we continue to compel students to try to pass them? — Anya Kamenetz

And so we polish our own lives, creating landscapes and canyons and peaks with the very silt we try to avoid, the dirt we disavow or hide or deny. It is the dirt of our lives - the depressions, the losses, the inequities, the failing grades in trigonometry, the e-mails sent in fear or hate or haste, the ways in which we encounter people different from us - that shape us, polish us to a heady sheen, make us in fact more beautiful, more elemental, more artful and lasting. — Terry Tempest Williams

The ancient Greek mathematician Ptolemy was born some time at the end of the first century. Ptolemy based his version of trigonometry on the relationships between the chords of circles and the corresponding central angles of those chords. Ptolemy came up with a theorem involving four-sided figures that you can construct with the chords. In the meantime, mathematicians in India decided to use the measure of half a chord and half the angle to try to figure out these relationships. Drawing a radius from the center of a circle through the middle of a chord (halving it) forms a right angle, which is important in the definitions of the trig functions. These half-measures were the beginning of the sine function in trigonometry. In fact, the word sine actually comes from the Hindu name jiva. — Mary Jane Sterling

"The Universe repeats itself, with the possible exception of history." Of all earthly studies history is the only one that does not repeat itself ... Astronomy repeats itself; botany repeats itself; trigonometry repeats itself; mechanics repeats itself; compound long division repeats itself. Every sum if worked out in the same way at any time will bring out the same answer ... A great many moderns say that history is a science; if so it occupies a solitary and splendid elevation among the sciences; it is the only science the conclusions of which are always wrong. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

Fain would I turn back the clock and devote to French or some other language the hours I spent upon algebra, geometry, and trigonometry, of which not one principle remains with me. Stay! There is one theorem painfully drummed into my head which seems to have inhabited some corner of my brain since that early time: "The square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides!" There it sticks, but what of it, ye gods, what of it? — Jessie Belle Rittenhouse

You remember your history?" He had finished five years of high school with respectable marks and a very good showing in trigonometry and geography but did not remember much history. In his final year, anyway, all you could think about was that you were going to the war. He said, "Not altogether. — Alice Munro

The teachers that we actually learn more from are the ones that taught us life lessons more than trigonometry. And they have such a huge responsibility and they're under-appreciated and underpaid. So that's my opinion of teachers. — Justin Timberlake

A considreable portion of my high school trigonometry course was devoted to the solution of oblique triangles ... I have still not had an excuse for using my talents for solving oblique triangles. If a professional mathematician never uses these dull techniques in a highly varied career, why must all high school students devote several weeks to the subject? — John G. Kemeny

Carpe Infans!
Beware Babies
There is no other human so seductive that an otherwise rational human will feed, clothe, sit up nights, work trigonometry with, bake cookies for, and generally tolerate for such long extents of time for such paltry returns of goods and services. They are a trap for the unwary ... all of us. — W. Clark Boutwell

Why?" she screamed. "Are you crazy? You know the English subjunctive, you understand trigonometry, you can read Marx, and you don't know the answer to something as simple as that? Why do you even have to ask? Why do you have to make a girl SAY something like this? I like you more than I like him, that's all. I wish I had fallen in love with somebody a little more handsome, of course. But I didn't. I fell in love with you! — Haruki Murakami

Perhaps I was mad, as I thought at moments; perhaps I was not like other men? But I was able to do the same things the others did; with a little effort and industry I could read Plato, was able to solve problems in trigonometry or follow a chemical analysis. These was only one thing I could not do: wrest the dark secret goal from myself and keep it before me as others did who knew exactly what they wanted to be- professors, lawyers, doctors, artists, however long this would take them and whatever difficulties and advantages this decision would bear in its wake. This I could not do. Perhaps I would become something similar but how was I to know? Perhaps I would have to continue my search for years on end and would not become anything, and would not reach a goal. Perhaps I would reach this goal but it would turn out to be an evil, dangerous, horrible one? — Hermann Hesse

Marie, you are the sine to my cosine."
My eyelashes fluttered and so did my heart, but I managed to tease, "Are you saying we'll never be on the same wavelength?"
He moved his head to the side as though considering my words. "More like, we complement each other. In basic trigonometry terms, cosine is the sine of the complementary or co-angle."
"I took trigonometry in high school. All I remember is pi r squared."
"I would argue that pie are round, but whatever gives you a right angle." He shrugged.
I laughed, even though the joke was painfully punny, and my hopes took his words as permission to start the countdown clock on their evil little space rocket. — Penny Reid

Even at midnight the city groans in the heat. We have had no rain for quite a while. The traffic sounds below ride the night air in waves of trigonometry, the cosine of a siren, the tangent of a sigh, a system, an axis, a logic to this chaos, yes. — Lorrie Moore

Since you are now studying geometry and trigonometry, I will give you a problem. A ship sails the ocean. It left Boston with a cargo of wool. It grosses 200 tons. It is bound for Le Havre. The mainmast is broken, the cabin boy is on deck, there are 12 passengers aboard, the wind is blowing East-North-East, the clock points to a quarter past three in the afternoon. It is the month of May. How old is the captain? — Gustave Flaubert

If the goal of conservatives is to discourage young people from having sex, they should change their strategy and push to make comprehensive sexual education compulsory. Our educational system has proved that if a subject is taught in a boring enough manner, Americans will make every effort to avoid it for the rest of their lives. If homosexuality was taught in the same manner as trigonometry, even most gay people would have no use for it after graduation. — Bob Smith

Everyone hated Calculus. Quadratic equations, parabolas, logarithms, trigonometry - you name it. It was like floating in an endless, frictionless void traveling at x miles per hour at a descension rate of one half the speed of gravity. Solve for x. — Andrew Sturm

They turned their desks into a trigonometric war room, poring over equations scrawling ideas on blackboards, evaluating their work, erasing it, starting over. — Margot Lee Shetterly

The entire routine of our memorized acquisitions is a consequence of nothing but the Law of Contiguity. The words of a poem, the formulas of trigonometry, the facts of history, the properties of material things, are all known to us as definite systems or groups of objects which cohere in an order fixed by innumerable iterations, and of which any one part reminds us of the others. — William James

In later life, people will be impressed that you can quote Shakespeare, and you will sound very intelligent. It's harder to quote trigonometry, or quadratic equations, and not half as romantic. — John Connolly

Can you imagine young people nowadays making a study of trigonometry for the fun of it? Well I did. — Clyde Tombaugh

All the geography, trigonometry, and arithmetic in the world are useless unless you learn to think for yourself. No school teaches you that. It's not on the curriculum. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

A surprise trigonometry quiz that everyone in class fails? Must be in the Lord's plan to give us challenges. — Nicholas Sparks

I love reading poetry, and yet, at this point, the thought of writing a poem, to me, is tantamount to figuring out a trigonometry question. — Jhumpa Lahiri