The Limitations of the Microsoft Calculator

A question came up today on how to determine the angle of a 5 inch pitch. I had to think back and the pitch means for every 12 inches horizontally. Thinking back to my trigonometry days of the sine, cosine, and tangent, I had to look up those three trig functions. The sine of the angle is equal to the opposite over the hypotenuse; the cosine of the angle is equal to the adjacent over the hypotenuse; the tangent of the angle is equal to the opposite over the adjacent. So the equation I have to solve for is tangent of the angle is equal to 5 over 12. So, I took the arctangent or the inverse tangent of both sides to solve for the angle which then became the angle equals the arctangent of 5 over 12. Since I couldn’t find inverse trig functions on the Microsoft Windows calculator, I had to find a calculator online that had it. The end result was 22.7 degrees.

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