CHAPTER 1 Mathematics

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In your study of plane geometry and trigonometry you learned of many geometrical relationships. We find many of those relationships useful in physics. We'll use them to describe both real, physical objects as well as totally abstract concepts.

Let's remind ourselves of a few of these relationships by taking a trip to my back yard to meet Gus. "Take" this lesson by checking out how the lesson page works, and then watching the video.

Here's the example problem that I discussed in the previous lesson. It's a bit tricky as it has several steps and you have to do some estimating from the scale of the figure.

When you're solving problems, a good system can help you reach your goal:

OK, here's how I worked the problem. Please note my commentary about how to use the navigation tools in the animation. I'm killing two birds with one stone here - showing the problem solution as well as how one of our navigation systems works.

Here's a second trigonometry example problem. Don't panic. There's not enough information showing to solve the problem. Notice that there is a play button at the bottom left. This means that there's a video lesson that you need to watch. In this one I'll give you some hints about how to work with these example problems. (If you'd like to try this one before I discuss it, watch the two movie clips, one at a time, by clicking on the m's in the circles.)