In a recent post I mentioned in passing that trigonometry can be generalized from functions associated with a circle to functions associated with other curves. This post will go into that a little further.

The equation of the unit circle is

and so in the first quadrant

The length of an arc from (1, 0) to (cos θ, sin θ) is θ. If we write the arc length as an integral we have

and so

is the inverse sine of x. Sine is the inverse of the inverse of sine, so we could define the sine function to be the inverse of F.

This would be a complicated way to define the sine function, but it suggests ways to create variations on sine: take the length of an arc along a curve other than the circle, and call the inverse of this function a new kind of sine. Or tinker with the integral defining F, whether or not the resulting integral corresponds to the length along a familiar curve, and use that to define a generalized sine.

Example: sin_p

We can replace the 2’s in the integral above with p‘s, defining F_p as

and defining sin_p to be the inverse of F_p. When p = 2, sin_p(x) = sin(x). This idea goes back to E. Lungberg in 1879.

The function sin_p has its applications. For example, just as the sine function is an eigenfunction of the Laplacian, sin_p is an eigenfunction of the p-Laplacian.

We can extend sin_p to be a periodic function with period 4F_p(1). The constants π_p are defined as 2F_p(1) so that sin_p has period π_p and π₂ = π.

Future posts

I intend to explore several generalizations of sine and cosine. What happens if you replace a circle with an ellipse or a hyperbola? Or a squircle? How do these variations on sine and cosine compare to the originals? Do they satisfy analogous identities? How do they appear in applications? I’d like to address some of these questions in future posts.

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