John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

How does a calculator find trigonometric ratios? Hello, I have a graphing calculator and when I find SIN(40), for example, it gives me a number. What I know about SIN is that it equals Opposite/Hypotenuse, so how does the calculator figure it out if it has no information about the Hypotenuse or the Opposite? I don't understand where it obtains those long numbers from?
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have you tried searching for this information on http://www.bing.com or http://www.google.com? or even http://mathworld.wolfram.com?

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