The Explosive Power of Tan(90)

This is something I had to share. 

Today in Physics we were looking at Cosine, Sine and Tangent (Cos, Sin and Tan). For relevance, because our Physics teacher is thorough to say the least, we were working out what 0, 30, 45, 60 and 90 degrees of Cos, Sin and Tan are. 

A diagram of a Triangle

(On a side note, this is actually really interesting because Sin goes: 0, 0.5, 0.71, 0.87, 1. Cos does the exact opposite: 1, 0.87, 0.71, 0.5, 0! And by knowing Sin and Cos you can find Tan without any other pieces of data, which is awesome. The maths behind Sine, Cosine and Tangent is really cool and kind of mind blowing for anyone below GCSE, seriously it can really help you with Trigonometry. Certainly helped me clear up a few things which had really been bugging me.)

The cool thing about Tan(90) is that it's infinity. Tan is opposite/adjacent and as the triangle changes shape the value of the opposite grows and that of the adjacent decreases. This idea continues and something which is constantly getting bigger divided by something constantly getting smaller = infinity. (At least that's the rough idea but I may edit this when I have more maths knowledge. The important thing is that it equals infinity).

So when you put Tan(90) into a GCSE or above calculator MATH ERROR comes up, try it if you want to. When we were all testing whether this was true a girl from my class launched into this brilliant little anecdote. 

Her maths teacher had spent about five minutes convincing two girls in their class that if you put Tan(90) into your calculator the calculator would explode. On account of the fact that it couldn't deal with infinity, of course. The blast radius of the explosion is 5m so it's basically a hand grenade! So girls if you're ever in a tight spot, type in Tan(90) and throw the calculator then run. 

These two girls completely fell for it, and were asking questions like 'Why aren't we told this?! Lower years get given these calculators! It's dangerous!' The teacher's response was 'Well, we don't want to tell year sevens they could have that kind of power, do we?'

The entire class was cracking up behind them, knowing it was complete lies. But, apparently, what sold the performance was the fact that the teacher said all of this completely calmly, face completely blank. 

My entire Physics class were in tears. 

... Yeah we might be a class full of nerds. Just possibly.