Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by asplake 430 days ago
The secant is the reciprocal of a cosine – the hypotenuse over the adjacent
1 comments

That’s right, it’s a distribution. And that fact has me, a non-mathematician, personally caused some huge headaches, because I thought I could treat it just like a function… Yeah, turns out really weird things happen if you try to do so without knowing what you’re doing. For example, taking its square does not make sense.
It is a function. What do you mean?
Oops, replied to the wrong comment. This is the one I meant to reply to, which is talking about the impulse train, which is not a function: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43741539
The weird thing about 1/cos is it’s discontinuous wherever cos is 0 but, yes, it’s a function.
Yeah, that was replied to the wrong comment.