The Small Angle Approximation
By HegelBot153
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At the time of writing Christmas is over, its before the New Year and the impetus to do anything school related has left my body and soul. Nonetheless I have a smithereen within me crying against the apathy that crowded so densely among my brain cells and I have found it and nourished it and it becomes this blogpost. According to the Wikipedia page, the small angle approximation is a convenient and necessary estimation where in some cases you can replace a trigonometric function of theta(Θ) with theta(Θ) itself. This is almost true as the angle in radians approaches zero, tan(Θ) and sin(Θ) will equal zero and cos(Θ) will equal one and this is approximately true for radian value slightly higher than zero. It seemed pertinent because one of the proofs we did in the last packet used this simplification and I'm certain that whosoever figured that one out thought themselves clever and are within their right to think so!
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