I’ve reached the conclusion that I really need to know everything. I actually tried to talk my mother into allowing me to drop out of school at age sixteen, giving her examples of actresses, writers and musicians who had been high-school drop-outs. I finished high school and then college, but I never took more math than I had to take. I used to ask my mother why I needed to know algebra. I would have prefered not to take it at all, in high school. Oh, how I now regret than I never took a geometry or a trigonometry class. Not only is trig heavily used in cool and innovative Flash generative art like that you can find in books like Flash Math Creativity or on sites like Levitated. It’s also difficult to begin to understand the basics of 3D rotation coding constructs, without learning trig.

Therefore, I was very happy recently to find a trigonometry tutorial by a Flash scripter and for Flash scripters. It took me less than an hour to go through this tutorial, and when I was finished with it, I felt ready to use trigonometry for 3D rotations in Flash. I realize that there are other, more sophisticated ways of coding rotations, using matrix math and quaternions. For what I’m currently doing, though, the trigonometry integrates more easily and immediately into the rest of the code. I would have to do a lot of rewriting in order to use either matrix math or quaternions.