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Originally Posted by Ensign Steve
Also I enjoyed this bit of historical perspective:
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High school students must learn to use the secant function, 'sec x,' as an abbreviation for the reciprocal of the cosine function, '1 / cos x,'. That
this particular shorthand, a holdover from fifteenth century nautical tables, is still with us (whereas others, such as the "versine" have died out) is mere historical accident, and is of utterly no value in an era when rapid and precise shipboard computation is no longer an issue.
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I had occasion to check out versine
and haversine recently. Distance between two points given in latitude and longitude.