Unit Circle - Blog Posts

How To Easily Remember the Unit Circle

I work in a walk-in tutor lab at my university and one of the other tutors showed me this a couple years back and it has changed my life.

First, you make a table that looks like this.

Then, go ahead and add in some nice denominators of 2 in every entry in the table.

Then give yourself some nice square roots on the numerators.

Alright – now we’re going to fill it in. The only value you have to remember is that sin(0)=0. So we put 0 in the numerator for 0 in the sine column. Then we just count up as we move down.

Then we do the opposite in the cosine column.

Then we simplify!

And voila – a beautiful unit circle table. 

English majors have Shakespearean sonnets. Math majors have the unit circle.