An Intuitive Way to Get Any Power of Cosine Function

Jihyun Cho I dont memorize formulas, but try to understand it. After I understand it, it used to be in my memory. However I still have trouble with sine and cosine functions. While I am studying harmonic distortion I just came up with very decent idea with which I can get any power of cosine function. Ill start with some general knowledge you may know, and then derive some magic rules from some observation. With those intuitive rules and graphical representation, we will be able to do some cosine magic!! Lets start with some multiplication. The following equation is very famous. I am not going to prove it. Its very trivial if you know Eulers formula. Lets just accept it. ( ) ( )

Here, on right side, we observe two cosine functions in superposition and divided by two. We can generally say when we multiple two cosine functions with different angle, we get two cosine functions with sum/difference of the angles. Some special cases are

We can find some interesting facts. (1) Multiplication with the same angle produces a constant term. (2) Multiplication by zero-angle-cosine (its just one) produces positive and negative angles. Because cosine is an even function, we just get two halves cosine (or just one cosine). We already get the square of cosine in above equations. Imagine we multiply another cosine to get the cosine cubed. By expansion, it becomes ( )

Now we have one quarter because we now have four terms. (In fact, three terms, but the first term has twice magnitude). We can repeat this job graphically with some rules. <Basic Rules for Building Table> When a cosine term is multiplied by Rule (1): The term is split into two terms, each angle of which is obtained by adding or subtracting the original angle by . Rule (2): A constant term, is split into two terms, but they are treated as one term with twice magnitude. Rule (3): Every term has to be scaled down with the total number of terms. <Table for 5th power of cosine> # terms 1 1 2*1 + 1 3 2*3 + 4 3+1 4+1 1 1 1 1 1 2 4 8 16

We just read the n-th power of cosine from the above table. For example,

I believe this method is very useful if you dont remember any equation like me. It will also give you some insight and intuition to look into some engineering or mathematical problems. Actually, I got this idea from the frequency translation property in Fourier Transform. If you study how to characterize the non-linearity in a linear system, you will see very similar concept there.