Using Inverse functions for Solving Real Life Problems

Using Inverse functions for Solving Real Life Problems Eamon Bolger and Chad Lam

Trigonometric functions in everyday life Even though it may not seem like it, we use math in our everyday lives. From measuring ingredients for breakfast to watching the number of calories you eat a day we use math to make it through the day. But these are just some simple examples, you may have wondered, where in life would we need to use a more complex math problem? Such as a trigonometric function. A great example of this would be in measuring the height of an object. As long as you have the distance from where you stand to the object and the angle from where you are to the top of the object you can find the height. The best part is you can do this with anything as long as you have these two variables.

Theory and Goal for this application We chose this application because of its simplicity and broadness towards others in the class. With many applications, while they use trigonometric function they may be exclusive to one or two majors or may have limited use for certain people. We chose to use trigonometric functions to find the height of any object with the right variables because it not only will apply to those whose careers use these methods, but to anyone for needing to know the height of an object can be considered a need for any individual. With this information, we theorize that while in many cases a measuring tape could solve your problem you can have another option just in case as a measuring tool at your disposal.

Here's a Problem you can try! Juan is a photographer for his school, he spots a bird on top of a building and takes a picture of it. He wants to put a caption saying how high the bird was under the picture. If Juan was 23 meters away from the building at a 60 degrees angle, what is the height of the building?

Solving the problem For this problem, we will be finding the height Of the building, we know that tan is opposite divided by adjacent and using the unit circle we can find the 60 degrees is equal to the square Root of 3, for our opposite we use the side AB and for our adjacent we use the 23 m given in the problem. Next we Multiply by 23 on both sides to get line AB by itself and multiply The square root of 3 by 23 to get 39. 84 m. We can check this by using the inverse of tan (y/x) which will give us 60 degrees.

Closing Words We learned that we can use trigonometric functions in our daily lives. The example we used was to find the height of a building. This could be used for real life scenarios to help you identify the height of an object as long as you know the distance between you and the building and the angle from you to the top of the building. Hopefully, with this application you will be more aware of the trigonometric functions that lie in your everyday activities.