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:It's usually better to not claim a "first" for specific characters, because such claims are nearly always wrong. The best is to just state exactly what we know: so-and-so specifically did such-and-such, and not speculate about whether or not anyone else had done so previously. One other phrasing that is usually accurate at the time (though can also become outdated) is something like "the earliest known X is found in Y" or "the oldest extant example of X is Y". –[[user:jacobolus|jacobolus]] [[user_talk:jacobolus|(t)]] 15:42, 14 February 2025 (UTC)
:I went ahead and boldly edited. If that's wrong, please undo ... and discuss further here. Thanks —[[User:Quantling|<span class="texhtml"><i>Q</i></span>uantling]] ([[User talk:Quantling|talk]] | [[Special:Contributions/Quantling|contribs]]) 15:51, 14 February 2025 (UTC)
:All of our articles [[Trigonometric functions]], [[Trigonometry]], and [[History of trigonometry]] also do a very poor job of explaining the varying mathematical context through history. There was no concept of "trigonometric functions" per se until quite recently. Through most of history these were taken to be line segments (and line segments were implicitly associated with their lengths), not numbers or ratios.
:It's anachronistic and misleading to say something like "X person invented the cotangent function" when an accurate description would be more like "X person wrote down a table associating the sun's altitude to the length of the shadow of a vertical gnomon (sundial rod), which 2 centuries later began to be used for more general trigonometric purposes". –[[user:jacobolus|jacobolus]] [[user_talk:jacobolus|(t)]] 15:54, 14 February 2025 (UTC)
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