The unit circle chart shows the positions of the points on the unit circle that are formed by dividing the circle into equal parts. The angles on the charts shown on this page are measured in radians.
At this point, you can continue dividing the unit circle into more subdivisions like , , or and find the coordinates corresponding to each angle. This by itself is useful because if your method for calcuating coordinates is accurate enough these values can be used in real-world applications.
These calculations are also a primer for the generalized form of this problem. Given an angle (theta) on the unit circle, what are the coordinates of the point corresponding to the angle? This is a genuinely hard problem and finding a general solution is difficult.
As a result, in modern-day math the two functions sine and cosine exist to answer exactly that problem. Given an angle as input, sine returns the vertical component and cosine returns the horizontal component of the point on the unit circle corresponding to the angle. Read more…
