<p>Currently I'm in Precalculus, ready to take Calculus AB/BC soon in the next year or so.</p>
<p>We got into trigonometry, and so far I've just been looking at the drawing as a reference. </p>
<p>Ex. Sin Pi/2= 1, Cos Pi/3=1/2</p>
<p>My question is, would it be beneficial to just memorize the whole unit circle? Or would it be useless in Calculus and I should just continue looking at the graph until PreCal is over?</p>
<p>Thanks CC</p>
<p>Yes, you definitely need to memorize the unit circle, because you will not have a calculator on the MC section of the Calculus AB test, and you will be expected to know the value of, say “sin of pi/2” for your answer.</p>
<p>You know, like all equations and formulas in math and science, there are patterns and ways to derive them… Look for that pattern.</p>
<p>The whole circle is a continuum, so memorizing it is impossible. You should know what sine and cosine look like and where their maxima and minima are though.</p>
<p>No, you don’t have to memorize the whole thing; it’s good to know pi/6, pi/4, and pi/3 on command, though. You can then use those to figure out the rest by just drawing out the functions.</p>
<p>For the first three, draw 45-45-90 (1-1-root 2) and 30-60-90 (1-root 3-2) triangles.</p>
<p>Yes, know the unit circle. Your life in Calc will be much harder without it.</p>
<p>Nah, just work it out in your head when you have to.</p>
<p>You need to know the important numbers in the unit circle. But what you should do instead f memorizing it straight up is to continue drawing it up and doing the calculation in your head, until eventually you don’t have to because you’ll already know it. That way you know where the numbers come from, but also don’t have to be forever redrawing the circle.</p>
<p>You should be able to derive any of theme at an instance.</p>
<p>UHH! We are learning this in Algebra 2 and I don’t even get it at all!! UHH</p>
<p>Write out 0 30 45 60 90
For sine, underneath those write 0 1 2 3 4
Divide all of them by 2. Take the square root of the numerator
Those are the sine values</p>
<p>Flip for cosine. (4 3 2 … etc)</p>
<p>And memorize their graphs from 0 to 360… where they are zero, 1, -1</p>
<p>This is very easy to remember. Then there is tangent which is really the only memorization needed</p>
<p>YES!! for sure</p>
<p>
I never realized that. Thanks, that’s going to make my life a lot easier if I can remember it.</p>
<p>I disagree about memorizing tangent though. If you know sine and cosine, you can just remember that sin/cos = tan.</p>
<p>Do you have your special right triangles memorized by any chance?
It’s the same thing.</p>
<p>Lawl, sin, cos and tan of 0 and π should be pretty obvious. Just memorize the other 6 numbers. Much quicker than using any trick. And as long as you understand why things are the way they are, you won’t get confused either.</p>
<p>tangent doesn’t come up very often in calculus, or in physics</p>
<p>It’s used rather a lot for solving triangles though.</p>
<p>You will struggle in calculus and beyond if you don’t know the unit circle.</p>
<p>Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I897 using CC App</p>
<p>Haha ok thanks guys.</p>
<p>I just memorized the 30 45 60 90 and so on in terms of Pi (Just using the multiples of a certain section ex Pi/6) </p>
<p>The coordinates is easy. Root 3/2 is greatest length, Root 2/2 is middle length, and 1/2 is the shortest length (Just visualized where the point is on the circle)</p>
<p>You can always draw one out and figure it out.</p>