# Sunday Function

Sine, cosine, and tangent are of course the workhorse functions of trigonometry. You learn 'em in high school, and if you go on in math and science you never stop using them. Now on many occasions you might have the sine or cosine or tangent of some angle, and you want a way to invert those functions to recover the angle from those values. Let's take a look at the inverse tangent function:

Now we'll do one of those things were we skip any motivation and just do some stuff for reasons we'll get to at the end. Let's find the derivative of the arctangent function. To start, take the tangent of both sides of the above definition. The tangent undoes the arctangent, so we get:

Differentiate both sides. The derivative of tangent is secant squared, which we could prove if we felt like it, and since f is a function we have to use the chain rule. Doing thus, and recalling that the derivative of x is 1:

Solve for the derivative:

Which isn't all that helpful except for the fact that there's a basic trig identity which connects the secant and tangent functions: sec(x)^2 - tan(x)^2 = 1. Substituting:

Ah! But tangent(f) is x, so we can swap that in:

Ok, ok. What's that good for? Well, if just write that down as our Sunday Function and graph it, we'll have something to celebrate:

That is the graph of a function, 1/(1+x^2), which has nothing at all to do with circles or geometry in any obvious way. But we know it's the derivative of the inverse tangent, and conversely the inverse tangent is the integral of that function, so we can easily plug in and see that the area under the curve is pi. Which is nice, because to day is Pi Day. Happy Pi Day!

Tags

### More like this

##### Sunday Function
You know about the tangent function, tan(x). If you draw a right triangle, the tangent is the ratio of the two sides which comprise the right angle. If the angle between the long sides and each of the short sides is 45 degrees, then clearly the two short sides have the same length. That means…
##### Sunday Function
Step right up, Ladies and Gentlemen! Get your ticket to see the True Oddities of the Natural World! Do not be taken in by the Shameful Forgeries at Inferior Circuses, here you will see Genuine Curiosities from the Mists of Time! Beside these Archaic Functions, the Two-Headed Horse or Whatever is…
##### Sunday Function
Here's sin(x). What, you don't believe me? Ok, ok, I'm leaving something out. Let's do some background before I tell you what it is. The first thing we need is the incredibly interesting and important Euler's formula. It's the key that relates the exponential and trigonometric functions. We…
##### Sunday Function
"So," Herr Schrodinger says to us, "I'm looking for a function of x. It needs to be equal to the negative of its second derivative, up to a constant factor. When x is zero, the function itself should be zero. And when x equals L for some constant L greater than zero, the function also needs to…

Which leads to an elegant series for (pi/4) ...since

f = arctan(x) = \int\frac{1}{1+x^2} = \int {1-x^2 + x^4 - x^6 +..}= x - x^/3 + x^5/5 - x^7/7 + ...

Using x=1

(pi/4) = 1 - (1/3) + (1/5) - (1/7) + (1/9) + ...

I was amazed when I read about this many years ago, its pretty (I'm not sure if the math is technically correct - integrating infinite series etc).

By Nachiket Gokhale (not verified) on 14 Mar 2010 #permalink

This function is (an example of) the Lorentzian function or Cauchy-Lorentz distribution. Its shape is characteristic of the power spectrum of many forms of randomly excited and damped oscillators.

This must sound like a naive question but it seems that quite different functions can be differentiated. What are we trying to do when we differentiate a function?

By Keith Griffiths (not verified) on 15 Mar 2010 #permalink

It is interesting to note that arc tan can play an important role in the calculator implementation of all kinds of functions. See Chapter 9 on CORDIC in my book Inside Your Calculator.

Just tried that in GNU Octave (like Matlab, but libre)