11/17 class notes

Today in class we talked about inverse trigonometric functions, like arcsin etc. The main concept we covered was the ambiguity of the number of solutions for these functions. In other words, how do we restrict arcsin etc. to only produce one solution? (for example if you plugged in arcsin= .5 to your calculator how could you insure that it would give you the answer 30 degrees rather than 390, - 330, etc?) Well what we do is restrict the domain and range. In the chart in the notes it lists the different domain and range restrictions for the different functions. The reason we have to insure they only have one solution is that if they had multiple they would not be functions anymore (aka more than one output).