Introduction

Waves and vibrations occur in many contexts. The water waves on the sea and the vibrations of a stringed musical instrument are just two everyday examples. If the vibrations are simple ‘to and fro’ oscillations they are referred to as ‘sinusoidal’ which implies that a knowledge of trigonometry, particularly of the sine and cosine functions, is a necessary pre-requisite for dealing with their analysis. In this Section we give a brief introduction to this topic.

Prerequisites

• have a knowledge of the basics of trigonometry
• be aware of the standard trigonometric identities

Learning Outcomes

• use simple trigonometric functions to describe waves
• combine two waves of the same frequency as a single wave in amplitude-phase form