from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
noun The reciprocal of the tangent of an angle in a right triangle.
noun The tangent of the complement of a directed angle or arc.
from The Century Dictionary.
noun In trigonom., the tangent of the complement of a given are or angle. Abbreviated cot. See the figure.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
noun (Trig.) The tangent of the complement of an arc or angle. See Illust. of functions.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
noun trigonometry In a right triangle, the reciprocal of the tangent of an angle. Symbols: cot, ctg, or ctn
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
noun ratio of the adjacent to the opposite side of a right-angled triangle
Etymologies
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Examples
It can also be used for such operations as involution (raising to a power) and evolution (extraction of a root) and for calculations with trigonometric functions (sine, cosine, tangent, cotangent).
Out on the various fronts the American soldiers grimly understood that they must hold on where they were for the sake of their comrades on other distant but nevertheless cotangent fronts on the circular line that guard Archangel.
The curves have the same general shape, but while the tangent function always slopes upward as you move toward the right, the cotangent always slopes downward.
We math majors could write term papers on cotangent bundles and prove the Bolzano Weirstrass theorem, but we don't know jack about T tests or chi-square.
If we are operating on some variable x, the arccotangent of x is denoted cotÀ1 (x) or arccot (x) The sine, cosine, tangent, cosecant, secant, and cotangent require special restrictions in order for the inverses to be de fi nable as legitimate functions.
The Right Triangle Model In the previous chapter, we de fi ned the six circular functions-sine, cosine, tangent, cosecant, secant, and cotangent-in terms of points on a circle.
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