Most people graduate high school and/or college wondering when they will ever use all of the knowledge they have accumulate during school days. After all, the War of 1812 doesn’t come up much in everyday conversation. But every so often, there’s a nugget of something obscure from school that helps in an everyday problem. This week, I had one of those experiences.
This is an example of a Pie Chart we were trying to make.
We’re working on a project that called for laying out a bunch of names in the correct or a Pie Chart. For example, the pie chart might have 6 wedges and we need to put name #1 in wedge #2, and name #2 in wedge #3. Of course, that’s easy — but it is much harder to place lots of names in the right part of the pie chart in an automated manner. We needed an easy, mathematical way to put the names in the right places.
I’ll spare the average reader the details, but the solution involved those trigonometric functions cosine and sine. Using these functions, we were able to come up with a way to plot the names in the right locations (for those interested: cosine of the angle on the circle yields the x coordinate, sine of the angle on the circle yields the y coordinate). We added another fun math function modulus and some random numbers and we found a solution that works for our project.
I admit it. I didn’t like 11th Grade Math much. Our teacher’s “Happy Parabolas” and “Sad Parabolas” only brought me sadness. But today, Pre-Calculus class was very useful in solving a Web site development problem.
