Thursday, December 15, 2011

What branch of mathematics should I study to best understand curves?

I was working on a programming project, and was trying to make a particular object follow a line in a circular fashion, if I gave it the origin.





The only problem I had is that I realized I had never made to a branch of mathematics that deals extensively with circular motion!





I know it will eventually be one of my courses throughout school, but I would like to begin studying it now.... Where should I start? Am I looking at an introduction to Trig, or am I missing something entirely?|||For circles, you'll want to learn trigonometry - look up the unit circle, it sounds like this is exactly what you are looking for.





If you want to expand your project to deal with other kinds of curves at a later date, start learning basic calculus.|||There's a number of ways you could approach this, I guess.





Maybe CO-ORDINATE GEOMETRY which would get you working with points in two dimensions, the equations of straight lines, the distance between points, and the equations of curves, including circles.





Later you could move on to three dimensions.





All of that is going to need a certain ability to handle ALGEBRA.





If you're particularly interested in motion, then maybe some MECHANICS is going to be needed, but I'd say that comes after the other two topics I've mentioned.





As always, Google is your gateway to a ton of goodness :-)





There are some free graphing software packages out there, stuff like Geo-Gebra and Graph which you might want to get hold of.





Hope that helps.





Good Luck with your studies.

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