Angles, trigonometric functions, and university level Analysis Carl Winsløw To cite this version: Carl Winsløw. Angles, trigonometric functions, and university level Analysis. First conference of In- ternational Network for Didactic Research in University Mathematics, Mar 2016, Montpellier, France. hal-01337947 HAL Id: hal-01337947 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01337947 Submitted on 27 Jun 2016 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Angles, trigonometric functions, and university level Analysis Carl Winsløw1, 1University of Copenhagen, Faculty of Science, Denmark,
[email protected] The transition from calculus to analysis presents well known challenges to many students. In line with Chevallard’s “paradigm of questioning the world”, we consider that part of the difficulty is a failure to question (explore) what the formal theory of analysis means for “familiar objects” from calculus. As a significant case, we consider the familiar notions of “angle”, cosine and sine. We first examine some “advanced” viewpoints on these objects coming from analysis, then the viewpoints an advanced student could produce on these notions, based on knowledge from an analysis course in which resources for a rigorous account were indeed available.