Fair enough, but did they use it? I always felt like focusing on statistics instead of random trig stuff for non stem people people would be more useful
Agreed, I use highschool level stats knowledge on a nearly daily basis, whereas the last time I did any trig was to follow along with a math video I was watching on YouTube. Trig/calc were mandatory, stats was not.
And stats really should be a mainline math class in high school. It comes up in so many places, and is far too often simplified away into a binary black & white choice.
Any time something happens that was predicted to be less than 50% likely, people lose their shit. For instance, when it unexpectedly rains or the wrong person wins an election.
But it’s not even being able to run the numbers or understanding statistical significance. It’s much more basic, just understanding that probabilities and uncertainty exist and are everywhere. My favorite example is when going to the doctor. They explain that whatever you have is probably X or Y, with a small chance of Z, but Y has been going around a lot and is easy to treat, so let’s try medication A for it. Then when that gets reported to friends and family afterwards, it’s “she said I have Y and I need A to fix it.”
Many modern compression schemes are more about signal processing than statistics , especially the lossy ones . IIRC 3blue1brown has a video on image compression if you want to learn about it in a visual way
Sticking with image compression, see Quite Okay Images. It treats each pixel as three numbers and expects mostly small changes. Recent pixels get hashed and can be referenced in a few bits. This is enough to compete with PNG filesizes, an order of magnitude faster, while handling each pixel exactly once.
though note than lossy formats , like JPEG which was used here , do use Fourier transforms , which are very intense trigonometry . IIRC PNG doesn’t use trigonometry either , though I’m not entirely sure yup PNG uses DEFLATE after some filtering , so no sine there I believe
Trig is honestly the math I’ve used the most since finishing school. But to be fair, that is mostly because it’s useful as hell when doing game development as a hobby.
Or building some stairs or really a ton of shit. Basic trig is such a useful thing that it tells me people who complain about it have never built anything, virtual or physical.
as I’ve said in a different comment , it sucks how little space school gives to recreational usage of the skills we learn . I deeply enjoy recreational linguistics , writing , yet school seldom gave me the tools I find useful , having to find them on my own , despite being thought them previously .
Yeah, I agree. They messed up the scheme we had going. It was a good thing, and electrical engineers had to come and be all different, confusing everyone else along the way.
From my point of view the mathematicians are evil. I can’t stand them using i in my math classes, messing my whole scheme up. Respect for my physics prof in my first semester for switching to use the correct letter j
There is hope for you after the asylum. My daughter has an EE degree. While in school, she would call me every October and tell me how terrible it was and that she wanted to drop out. I would talk her off the ledge, and she got through.
Now she’s working, making more money than I do in her early twenties, and she loves loves loves her job.
Luckily I have 6 years of Electronics manufacturing experience, so the math and theory are the things I’ll need to learn most of. Unfortunately, those things are the hardest part…
I used to, but I don’t often find the time these days. Trig for days. Especially given most game input is in (x,y) format from analog sticks or WASD. Gotta turn that into angles! (Not that you need much trig to turn WASD into angles.)
I use trig every few years when buying a tv. Tv specs always list diagonal but rarely horizontal and vertical which is needed for knowing how a TV will fit in a space.
Ratios can be used in trig – if it’s 1.5 times as long as it is tall, tan(\theta) = \frac{2}{3}, which then allows you to find the lengths of the other two sides easily so long as you have a calculator.
Right, but why bring theta into it at all? TV screens are as a hypotenuse (a²+b²) with a fixed ratio (a/b=16/9), so you just need to solve for a and b.
You don’t have to, but it seems perfectly easy since you don’t have to write anything down to solve it. csin(arctan(b/a)) gives b, and ccos(arctan(b/a)) gives a. I’m not disputing that you can do it without, but I don’t think it’s necessarily any quicker or easier.
I like math :) Its mysterious and fascinating and constantly surprising, like seeing the source code of the universe. Closest shit we have to actual magic.
Not me. I went years without until last week I realised I needed them for a script that points an object at a target in Maya. Turns out trig is really fucking universal.
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