Concept
Divine Proportions: Rational Trigonometry to Universal Geometry is a 2005 book by the mathematician Norman J. Wildberger on a proposed alternative approach to Euclidean geometry and trigonometry, called rational trigonometry. The book advocates replacing the usual basic quantities of trigonometry, Euclidean distance and angle measure, by squared distance and the square of the sine of the angle, respectively. This is logically equivalent to the standard development (as the replacement quantities can be expressed in terms of the standard ones and vice versa). The author claims his approach holds some advantages, such as avoiding the need for irrational numbers. The book was "essentially self-published" by Wildberger through his publishing company Wild Egg. The formulas and theorems in the book are regarded as correct mathematics but the claims about practical or pedagogical superiority are primarily promoted by Wildberger himself and have received mixed reviews. The main idea of Divine Proportions is to replace distances by the squared Euclidean distance, which Wildberger calls the quadrance, and to replace angle measures by the squares of their sines, which Wildberger calls the spread between two lines. Divine Proportions defines both of these concepts directly from the Cartesian coordinates of points that determine a line segment or a pair of crossing lines. Defined in this way, they are rational functions of those coordinates, and can be calculated directly without the need to take the square roots or inverse trigonometric functions required when computing distances or angle measures. For Wildberger, a finitist, this replacement has the purported advantage of avoiding the concepts of limits and actual infinity used in defining the real numbers, which Wildberger claims to be unfounded. It also allows analogous concepts to be extended directly from the rational numbers to other number systems such as finite fields using the same formulas for quadrance and spread.
