The Ti-83 in Polar Mode A user’s guide

How to get the Ti-83 into Polar Mode: Keystrokes Screenshot from my Ti-84

Where do I graph? Keystroke

Window Settings Minimum value for the angle (usually 0). Maximum value for the angle (usually 2Pi or Pi). When your calculator graphs in polar mode, it plots a series of points connected by line segments. This tells the calculator how large of an angle to sweep out before plotting the next point. The rest of these are your standard window viewing settings.

Radian or Degree Mode? Performing these keystrokes before graphing will automatically set the window settings to their standard format. In polar mode, the calculator will choose the domain to be one full revolution of a circle and 48 steps (points) within that domain. Radian Degree In other words, both modes are equivalent and therefore it doesn’t matter which you use so long as you begin with the standard window settings by using the keystrokes above.

!!Caution!! After entering my function I never hit the key when I’m in polar mode. It’s much easier to use which will take you directly to the graph and then tweak the window settings later (more on this to come).

Example 1 Hit these buttons.Screen looks like…

Example 1 (cont.) Hit these buttons next. Screen looks like… Window settings are…

The following steps are optional!

How do I make it pretty Note the following: The cosine (or sine) of an angle will be at most 1. Therefore, the maximum distance that three times the cosine of an angle can ever be from the pole is three. So, we can change our window settings to reflect this.

Choosing a better window setting

From there we can remove the axes and square it up Turns the axes off. Squares the axes.

What if my angle step gets messed up? First, you can always zoom to the standard window like on slides 5 & 6. You might get something that looks like the following for the last example: Angle step too large. Weird graph.

Whatever shall I do? Magical combination. Better graph.