Talk:Trigonometric functions: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 02:48, 26 March 2004

Revision as of 02:49, 26 March 2004

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* [http://www.ualr.edu/~lasmoller/trig.html The birth of trigonometry]

Some of these transliterate this Hindu term as ''jya'' instead of ''jiva''. Maor attributes the first translation to Gherardo of Cremona (c. 1150) instead of Robert of Chester (although he doesn't explicitly say Gherardo was "first"). Boyer, however, describes how both Robert of Chester and Gherardo of Cremona, along with several others, were contemporaries who were gathered together in Toledo by the archbishop there, where a school of translation was developed. Boyer says that Robert made the first translation of e.g. the Koran and of al-Khwarizmi's ''Algebra'', among other things. Boyer also says, however, that most of these works are not dated, so it is possible that there is some uncertainty over who first translated the trigonometric work.

Maor also says that, although the first use of half-chords was in the ''Siddhanta'', the first explicit reference to the sine function was the ''Aryabhatiya'' a century later. There, Aryabhata the elder uses the term ''ardha-jya'', which means "half-chord", which he later shortens to ''jya'' or ''jiva''.