Trigonometry in complex inner product spaces (Q2419068)

The authors propose to define the cosine of an angle \(\cos\angle(\vec{x},\vec{y})\) in complex Hilbert space whose legs are spanned by vectors \(\vec{x}\) and \(\vec{y}\), respectively, as \[\cos\angle \theta(\vec{x}, \vec{y}) := \frac{\langle \vec{x}, \vec{y} \rangle + \langle \vec{y}, \vec{x} \rangle}{2 \Vert \vec{x} \Vert \Vert \vec{y} \Vert}.\] This definition compensates for the asymmetry of the inner product and always yields a real number of norm not larger than \(1\). Obviously, it is equivalent to the usual concept of angle measure in a Euclidean space. It more or less automatically implies the cosine theorem which is shown to be equivalent to the sine theorem. The authors proceed to prove the two fundamental similarity theorems for triangles (aide-angle-side and angle-angle-angle), the trigonometric addition formulas for sine and cosine, and the theorem on the sum of angles in a triangle. The authors' success to recover essential results of elementary Euclidean trigonometry is a strong argument that their definition is appropriate and, arguably, more meaningful than similar attempts to define the measure of an angle in a complex Hilbert space.