Spherical Law of Sines
Requires a Wolfram Notebook System
Interact on desktop, mobile and cloud with the free Wolfram Player or other Wolfram Language products.
Draw a spherical triangle on the surface of the unit sphere with center at the origin . Let the sides (arcs) opposite the vertices have lengths , and , and let , and be the angles at the vertices , and . The spherical law of sines states that .
Contributed by: Izidor Hafner (February 2017)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
Snapshots
Details
Let be the orthogonal projection of onto the plane . Let and be the orthogonal projections of onto the lines and , respectively. Then , , , and , so .
References
[1] Wikipedia. "Spherical Law of Cosines." (Feb 22, 2017) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_law_of _cosines.
[2] Wikipedia. "Spherical Trigonometry." (Feb 22, 2017) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_trigonometry.
Permanent Citation