Differentiation of the sine and cosine functions from rst principles

mc-TY-sincos-2009-1 In order to master the techniques explained here it is vital that you undertake plenty of practice exercises so that they become second nature. After reading this text, and/or viewing the video tutorial on this topic, you should be able to: dierentiate the function sin x from rst principles dierentiate the function cos x from rst principles

Contents
1. Introduction 2. The derivative of f (x) = sin x 3. The derivative of f (x) = cos x 2 3 4

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1. Introduction
In this unit we look at how to dierentiate the functions f (x) = sin x and f (x) = cos x from rst principles. We need to remind ourselves of some familiar results. The derivative of f (x). The denition of the derivative of a function y = f (x) is f (x + x) f (x) dy = lim dx x0 x Two trigonometric identities. We will make use of the trigonometric identities sin C sin D = 2 cos cos C cos D = 2 sin The limit of the function sin . sin tends to 1. We write this as C +D CD sin 2 2 sin C D 2

C +D 2

As (measured in radians) approaches zero, the function sin =1 0 lim

This result can be justied by choosing values of closer and closer to zero and examining the sin behaviour of . sin Table 1 shows values of and as becomes smaller. 1 0.1 0.01 sin 0.84147 0.09983 0.00999
sin sin

0.84147 0.99833 0.99983

Table 1: The value of

as tends to zero is 1. sin ap

You should verify these results with your calculator to appreciate that the value of proaches 1 as tends to zero. We now use these results in order to dierentiate f (x) = sin x from rst principles.

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2. Differentiating f (x) = sin x

Here f (x) = sin x so that f (x + x) = sin(x + x). So f (x + x) f (x) = sin(x + x) sin x The right hand side is the dierence of two sine terms. We use the rst trigonometric identity (above) to write this in an alternative form. sin(x + x) sin x = 2 cos = 2 cos x + x + x x sin 2 2 2x + x x sin 2 2 x x ) sin 2 2

= 2 cos(x + Then, using the denition of the derivative dy = dx

f (x + x) f (x) x0 x lim

2 cos(x + x ) sin x 2 2 = x The factor of 2 can be moved into the denominator as follows, in order to write this in an alternative form: cos(x + x ) sin x dy 2 2 = dx x/2 x sin x 2 = cos x + x 2 2 We now let x tend to zero. Consider the term = x . We see that 2
x0

sin x 2
x 2

and use the result that lim

sin = 1 with

lim

sin x 2
x 2

=1

Further,
x0

lim cos x +

x 2

= cos x

So nally, dy = cos x dx

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3. The derivative of f (x) = cos x.

Here f (x) = cos x so that f (x + x) = cos(x + x). So f (x + x) f (x) = cos(x + x) cos x The right hand side is the dierence of two cosine terms. This time we use the trigonometric identity C +D C D cos C cos D = 2 sin sin 2 2 to write this in an alternative form. cos(x + x) cos x = 2 sin 2 sin 2x + x x sin 2 2 = 2 sin(x + Then, using the denition of the derivative dy = dx f (x + x) f (x) x0 x lim x x ) sin 2 2 x + x + x x sin 2 2

2 sin(x + x ) sin x 2 2 = x The factor of 2 can be moved as before, in order to write this in an alternative form: sin(x + x ) sin x dy 2 2 = dx x/2 x sin x 2 = sin x + x 2 2 We now want to let x tend to zero. As before lim sin x 2
x 2

x0

=1

Further,
x0

lim sin x +

x 2

= sin x

dy = sin x dx So, we have used dierentiation from rst principles to nd the derivatives of the functions sin x and cos x.

So nally,

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