Other Pictures

There are two other ways of showing the trail that sine and cosine functions make. The first one is called a Polar Equation.

Remember how we had the stick swinging around in a circle? Well, a polar equation swings a stick around in a circle--but, instead of using the length of the shadows to get a sine and cosine, we're going to use the value of the sine and cosine to change the length of the stick as it swings around!

Yet another kind of drawing we can make is called a Lissajous Figure. In this case, we use two sine and cosine functions. The value of the first function becomes the horizontal position, and the second function becomes the vertical position. This is completely different from swinging the stick around, so we won't even try to make a comparison.