Video: Various Careers That Utilize Trigonometry

Careers that utilize trigonometry include surveyors and route planners. Find a career that uses trigonometry with tips from an assistant mathematics professor in this free video on mathematics.

Video Transcript

Here are some careers that may involve needing to know trigonometry. Now, there are two ways that you may need to know trigonometry. One, in order to be able to check the computer calculations and know when they're right or wrong. The other of course would be to program that computer software in the first place. The first job I list is surveyor or appraiser. This becomes very important when you're looking at a piece of property with an irregular shape, you need to be able to chop it into triangles, and then calculate using some angles that you can measure how much land there is. And another career would be navigator or route planner. This might be more specifically for an airline or for a company that puts up global positioning satellites, or for any sort of planning on land or sea. Interestingly, the shortest route from one point to another on the earth isn't the straight line that we normally think of but a great circle. So you might need to be able to calculate some angles in order to make your flight path follow that great circle as closely as possible. A chemist may need to be able to calculate and use bond angles and molecules. A particle physicist might need to be able to calculate and use scattering angles when considering particle collisions. And a lot of other areas of science are going to be interested in angles. Nuclear physicists have to calculate cross sections, how large the nucleus of an atom might appear to the neutron heading its way at a certain angle. An astronomer might need to be able to consider the graphs of trigonometry functions that represent a variable star or the spectrum of light coming from the star. In a career involving robotics, angles are going to be very important when you consider that you need to be able to calculate the range of motion of either a robotic arm used in manufacturing or even surgery or other parts inside of a robot, maybe even a mobile robot exploring another planet. Though here are some software careers that may use some trigonometry. Recognition software is becoming really important. We'd like to be able to teach a computer to recognize your face, or maybe a part of your face like your eye. A lot of that's going to depend upon which angle you're at when you face the camera. Of course computer graphics if we want them to be realistic are going to need a lot of angles, a lot of trigonometry, in order again to calculate perspective and three dimensions, shadowing and lighting. In fact, any design career that is going to involve triangles is eventually going to use a little bit of trigonometry here and there. For instance if you're going to design things architecturally, like a geodesic dome, you're going to use a lot of triangles in your dome structure.

Various Careers That Utilize Trigonometry

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