Did you learn it as “sign on highway, cozy at home, tan on arm”? That’s basically the only high school math that stuck with me.

Oh and I guess negative b plus or minus b squared something something four a c over two a. I think there’s a square root to shove most of that into.

I always thought sohcahtoa itself was quite memorable. Sounds like a war cry!

Or something those wordy math textbooks would have had - the Sohcahtoa Indians who dealt in triangles …

It would get him fired today... but my trig teacher showed up to this lesson shirtless in a floor length native American headdress, and ran into class yelling "I am Chief SohCahToa! Never forget my name!!".

And by God, I never have. Thanks Mr. Wilkinson.

That sounds like an actual teacher! Amazing.

It sounded to me like something some colonists would carve into a fence, like CROATOAN.

SOHCAHTOA.

always made me think of krakatoa (the exploding island)

We made this up in school: "saya tak hensem, kalau saya hensem, tentu Tipah suka" [opposite = tentang, adjacent = sebelah, cos = kos]

Translation: I'm not handsome, if I were handsome, Tipah (our principal) would like me"

25 years ago and I still remember it clearly. Also it was middle school education on how to solve problems in a different space; this one solving math in a second language space lol

In my school, it was "Some Old Hippie Caught Another Hippie Tripping On Acid," which succeeded in being quite memorable for me. In retrospect it seems a bit wild compared to some of the examples here, especially considering it was taught at a public school in the US deep south!

I learned it as: Some old hags, can't always hide, their old age.

I guess this is the version we use in Australia.

Sex On Holidays Can Advance Happiness To Outrageous Amplitudes. Not suitable for a high school class, though.

For us it was "Some officers have curly auburn hair 'til old age". Never seemed like a good mnemonic given that you have to shorten "until" to make it work and none of us had any idea what "auburn" was, but I still remember it 20 years later so...

Sorry, what are all these mnemonics for? I can't imagine what you are trying to remember with these, as we never introduced such mnemonics in school.

S - Sine O - Opposite H - Hypotenuse SOH is a way to remember sine = opposite / hypotenuse

A - Adjacent T - Tangent C - Cosine

No. Just "Sohcahtoa" was enough. Didn't need to create a backronym for it.

And the quadratic equation...yeah, I don't remember that one.

In the UK it was “Attack Henry Cooper, outside his shop, on a Tuesday” no idea why the random violence but I never forgot it

For me, UK, posh school, 1980s it was just "sohcahtoa" - easy enough to be its own mnemonic. No need to gild a lily.

Your order is cosine, sine, tangent - CST. A quick look at the other examples here seem to prefer SCT - as do I but only because that is what I was taught.

I also note your mnemonic is very different to the one I learned in having the function name last. So AHC vs CAH.

There is no right or wrong here but I'm sure we can agree that there are loads of mnemonics for these basic trig formulae and nationality isn't involved.

UK, state school, late 90s/early 2000s, also just "sohcahtoa" - pronounced as a single word mostly. It never felt like it needed more than that?

It seems we have an agreement on this. There is no need to gild the lily!

I also went to a lot more schools than normal, thanks to living in multiple countries and my dad (army) moving every 18 months or so!

sohcahtoa is nearly a word.

Allegedly your grandpa, armed with his slide rule, has even more random violence:

"Spitfire or Hurricane come and hurry to our aid"

This works for me as the order of the functions matches the order shown on my trusty FX82A. Your version is kind of messed up.

I am giving this AI thing a wide birth, however, could we ask a LLM to invent a new aide memoire for this? We have got the silent generation and the boomers covered, but is there something we can do for kids today? Maybe it references Cinnamoroll, Hello Kitty or Octonauts characters that actual kids know, without it being ultra-violent.

UK, state school: “some officers have coaches and horses to order about”

For us it was: "two old angels skipped over heaven carrying a harp"

some old hippie caught another hippie tripping on acid

I find it conceptually cool, but I struggled in school with learning the identities, memorization being one of my weak areas.

If you know your trig well enough, you can derive the identities.

For example, knowing that cosine and sine are the exact same wave, just 90 degrees out of phase, it's trivial to know that sin(angle) = cos(angle + 90)

cos(a)^2 + sin(a)^2 = 1 is easy to show, too. If you use a=0, it's trivial. But try using 45 degrees. It turns into (sqrt(2)/2)^2 + (sqrt(2)/2)^2 which simplifies to 0.5 + 0.5 = 1.

Many of the others can be derived by just manipulating the Law of Sines or Law of Cosines. Fun fact: The Pythagorean Theorem is actually just a special case of the Law of Cosines:

c^2 = a^2 + b^2 - 2*a*b*cos(C)

Recall that in the Law of Cosines as I've written it, the lowercase letters are the sides, and the large C is the angle opposite that side. So if you choose your hypotenuse to be c, then the opposite angle, C, is 90 degrees. cos(90) is 0, so that whole last term gets cancelled out and you're left with the equation known as the Pythagorean Theorem.

I really wasn't kidding when I said I enjoyed trig.

Too late to edit now, but wanted to add a note:

Knowing that cos(45) == sqrt(2)/2 seems like something you would need to memorize, but if you just draw an isosceles right triangle with sides equal to 1 and use the Pythagorean Theorem you'll find that the hypotenuse is sqrt(2)/2.

This made my day. Great alias!

Some Old Horse Caught Another Horse Taking Oats Away

Obligatory xkcd: https://xkcd.com/809/

You think they hate trigonometry, then you tell them about radians and they really hate trigonometry. Which is... crazy really.