Trig calculator: sin, cos, tan and their inverses

Multiply by π/180: 30° is π/6 ≈ 0.5236 rad, 45° is π/4 ≈ 0.7854 rad and 180° is π rad. To go back, multiply radians by 180/π ≈ 57.2958. Mixing the two is the most common trig mistake: sin 30 with the angle read as radians is −0.988, not 0.5.

sin 30° = 1/2, sin 45° = √2/2 ≈ 0.7071 and sin 60° = √3/2 ≈ 0.8660; cosine takes the same values in reverse order, so cos 30° = √3/2 and cos 60° = 1/2. tan 30° = √3/3 ≈ 0.5774, tan 45° = 1 and tan 60° = √3 ≈ 1.7321. All of them come from the 30-60-90 and 45-45-90 triangles.

Because tan θ = sin θ / cos θ and cos 90° = 0, so the ratio divides by zero. As θ approaches 90° from below, tan θ grows without bound: tan 89° ≈ 57.29 and tan 89.9° ≈ 572.96. The same happens at 270° and every 90° + 180°k. Secant is undefined at those angles too, and cosecant and cotangent wherever sin θ = 0.

No. sin⁻¹ x, also written arcsin x, is the inverse function: the angle whose sine is x, so sin⁻¹ 0.5 = 30°. 1/sin x is the reciprocal, called cosecant: csc 30° = 1/0.5 = 2. The clash arises because sin² x means (sin x)², while the −1 exponent on a function name means its inverse; writing arcsin avoids the ambiguity.

A function must return a single value, so arcsin is restricted to a principal range of −90° to 90° (DLMF §4.23). Every other angle with the same sine follows from θ and 180° − θ plus whole turns: sin θ = 0.5 for θ = 30° + 360°k or 150° + 360°k, with k any integer. For arccos the range is 0° to 180° and the other family is −θ + 360°k.

Accuracy depends on your inputs and the method's assumptions. Decimal arithmetic uses 50 significant digits, but estimates, numerical methods and source data can be less precise; the displayed rounding does not remove those limits. It is checked against 13 worked examples whose answers come from independent sources; for example, “sin 30°” is checked against Standard special value (A&S Table 4.3); Python 3.8 math: cos(radians(30)).

NIST Digital Library of Mathematical Functions §4.14 (definitions) and §4.23 (inverse trigonometric functions, principal values); Abramowitz & Stegun, Handbook of Mathematical Functions, Table 4.3 — special values of the trigonometric functions.