## Transformations of Sine

Functional notation and transformations is always tricky to teach and understand.  GCSE students will meet this in Year 11.   In general, transformations applied after the function are more easily understood:

$y=f(x)+a$  or  $y=af(x)$

Something very un-intuitive happens when the transformation is applied to the argument of the function:

$y=f(x-a)$  or  $y=f(ax)$

with things stretching when they look like they should be compressing and other things moving the wrong way.

Mathematics is not always obvious, if it were we wouldn’t need it.

Try this for transformations of Sine.

## The linear combination of a sine and a cosine is itself a sine wave

A linear combination of two functions, $f(x)$ and $g(x)$ is a sum involving constant multiples of the functions.  That is,

$a f(x)+b g(x)$

where $a, b \in \mathbb{R}$.

So, in the case of $\sin x$ and $\cos x$, we would have,

$a\sin(x)+b\cos(x)$.

It is a slightly surprising fact that the linear combination of two sine waves is itself a sine wave.  The set of sine waves is closed under linear combination.

The in the featured animation, $a\sin(x)$ is green and dotted and $b\cos(x)$ is red and dotted.  The resulting linear combination is the continuous blue line.  The value $a$ is set to 2.5, whereas the value $b$ is animated.

This principle occurs in A level maths, Core 3, and is responsible for many long and complex questions.