Graph of Circle as a FunctionDate: 05/30/98 at 10:15:32 From: Molly Thompson Subject: circles Is the graph of a circle a function? How could you make it a function? I have determined that it is not a function because when you do the vertical line test, the line intersects the circle in two places. But I don't know how you could make it a function. Date: 05/30/98 at 13:45:04 From: Doctor Gary Subject: Re: circles I hope you know what the "vertical line" test tells you, and how that is related to the definition of a function. The "vertical line" test on the two-dimensional plane tells you whether there is any value of x for which there is more than one value of y. Since that's true for lots of values of x in the graph of any circle, a circle is not a function of x, in the same way that lines or some parabolas are. To make the graph of a circle into a function, we'll start by looking at the definition of the word "function". A function is an operation which yields one, and only one, "result" for each item of "input." But there's no reason why an item of input has to be found on the x axis, or why the result has to be a single solitary number. The input could be distance along a diagonal, or the angle of a ray, and the result could be a point of the Cartesian plane. Suppose, for example, that we drew a ray, beginning at the point (0,0) and going up and to the right, so that x and y were always equal. We could create a "function" which took the distance traveled "up the ray" as the input and the point we'd be on the line (both x and y coordinate) as the "result." If we travel square root of 2 up the ray, we are at the point (1,1). For any distance, there is only one point. Now let's think about making a circle into a function. If our "input" were the angle of a ray drawn outward from the point (0,0), our "result" could be the x and y coordinates of the point at which the ray intersected the unit circle centered at the origin. In fact, trigonometry is based on this very concept. For each angle, there is one, and only one, point at which the ray intersects the circle. The angles are measured counterclockwise, by reference to the right-hand side of the x-axis, and the co-ordinates of that point of intersection between the ray and the unit circle are called the cosine and sine of the angle. -Doctor Gary, The Math Forum Check out our web site! http://mathforum.org/dr.math/ |
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