Day: July 4, 2018

When Cos(x) is larger than 1

My son stumbled on an amazing graph completely by accident the other day. He’s doing some work reviewing trig functions this week and I asked him to just play around with some graphs in Mathematica to get a feel for how Sin[x] and Cos[x] behave. One of the graphs he drew was:

y = \cos( \sqrt{x}) from x = -100 to 100:

Screen Shot 2018-07-01 at 6.17.42 PM

I certainly wasn’t expecting him to make a graph like this one, but was happy that he did. Yesterday we talked through what was going on.

We started by discussing why the graph seemed so strange:

Now we dove into some of the details – which involve complex numbers and the definition:

e^{i \theta} = \cos(\theta) + i \sin(\theta)

as well as the definition of even and odd functions. So, there’s a lot of math to that we need to bring to the table to understand what’s going on in our graph.

Finally, we calculated the exact value of \cos(7i). Again, there’s a lot of advanced math that comes in to the calculation here – but even if some of the math ideas took a bit to sink in, I’d say that all in all it was a good conversation: