Math/Trig problem

superman22x

Golden Master
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Ok, picture is below. This is for a building my dad is working on. There is a curved wall, and a straight wall that is tangent to the curved wall. The radius of the curved wall is 294' and the length of the tangent wall is 108'. I drew in a vertical line to make it into a triangle to help visualize in the picture.

What we need are the vertical lengths from the horizontal line to the circle, every 4 feet. Any idea how to calculate it?

Problem.png
 
what do you exactly mean?

you can just technically measure it on the x axis and make notches every 4'. then make a corresponding notch above them on the circular wall
 
I suggest you first scale this down using the highest common factor. Next, you translate a circle (using the formula x^2 + y^2 = r^2) with the scale radius so the left most point is touching the y-axis and the bottom-most point is touch the x-axis. You let the horizontal line be the x-axis. Plug all this into a TI-83 and use the table function for every 4 points on the x-axis. It should give you a corresponding length on the y value.
 
Ahh, good call, forgot about that formula.

Plug it into a "for loop" in Matlab, and have all the answers in no time, lol
 
Yeah, we use it in our engineering fundamentals class, it's a really nice program. I can see some good use to it when I get into higher level maths I think.
 
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