Monthly Archive: November 2017

If you are like me, your first contact with the hyperbolic functions was as "this strange, useless something on the calculator". There were just some weird buttons labeled "sinh" and "cosh". The school finally explained what "sin" and "cos" are, but there was no mention of those variants with the final "h". What is this about? The names suggest some similarity to the trigonometric functions, let's see what happens:

$$\begin{array}{ll} \cos (1) = 0.54030230586 & \cosh (1) = 1.54308063482 \\ \cos (10) = -0.83907152907 & \cosh (10) = 11013.2329201 \end{array}$$

(You will get these results if you have the calculator set to radians - if you use degrees, then the cosine results will be different; it has no influence on the hyperbolic functions and we'll see later why that is.)

Right, these 11 thousand for cosh(10) look very similar to the trigonometric functions. This "h" apparently changes quite a bit, but what exactly...?

If you encountered complex numbers during your later education, you could stumble upon such definitions:

$$\begin{array}{ll} \cos x = \frac{e^{ix} + e^{-ix}}{2} & \cosh x = \frac{e^x + e^{-x}}{2} \\ \sin x = \frac{e^{ix} - e^{-ix}}{2i} & \sinh x = \frac{e^x - e^{-x}}{2} \end{array}$$

Some similarity is visible here, but... Why such a form? What does this have to do with hyperbolas? If you don't know it yet, you will know after reading this article.

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