The precursors to what we study today as Trigonometry had their origin in ancient Mesopotamia, Greece and India. These cultures used the concepts of angles and lengths as an aid to understanding the movements of the heavenly bodies in the night sky. Ancient trigonometry typically used angles and triangles that were embedded in circles so that many of the calculations used were based on the lengths of chords within a circle. The relationships between the lengths of the chords and other lines drawn within a circle and the measure of the corresponding central angle represent the foundation of trigonometry - the relationship between angles and distances.
This College Algebra text will cover a combination of classical algebra and analytic geometry, with an introduction to the transcendental exponential and logarithmic functions. If mathematics is the language of science, then algebra is the grammar of that language. Like grammar, algebra provides a structure to mathematical notation, in addition to its uses in problem solving and its ability to change the appearance of an expression without changing the value.
