Law of Sines With Cross Products

Me
June 8, 2018

1 ...uh, what is the law of sines again?

Harken back to that introduction to geometry class you took years ago and
you may remember two laws relating the angles and side lengths of a triangle:
the law of sines, and the law of cosines.

The law of sines states the following:

C
a b
B
c A
For some triangle with angles A,B,C and opposite sides a,b,c there exists the
following relation:

sin(A) sin(B) sin(C)

a = b = c
.

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2 The Proof
As you may have realized a triangle can be constructed as three vectors, in
the case of our triangle:

~a between points B and C

~b between points A and C
~c between points A and B

Don’t worry that I haven’t defined a direction for these vectors - we’ll only
be using them for their magnitudes anyway.

The cross product can be expressed as the product of the magnitudes of two
vectors with the sine of the angle between them. Let’s find the cross product
relevant to each angle.

~a × ~b = |a||b|sin(C)
~b × ~c = |b||c|sin(A)
~a × ~c = |a||c|sin(B)

These may seem unrelated to each other, but remember that the magnitude
of the cross product is equal to the area of the paralellogram made from the
two vectors, which is in turn twice the area of the triangle. That sounds like
a hot mess of an explanation, but a picture should clear things up. Observe:

2
 c’
C
b’ a b
B
c A
Here we see that because ~b × ~c = the area of the parallelogram constructed
by sides of length b and c we can split that parallelogram into two equal
triangles, one of which is the triangle made by our two vectors. This leads
to the statement:

Area A = 21 (~b × ~c), or ~b × ~c = 2A, whatever your fancy.

But it isn’t just these two vectors that have this property. ALL vectors
constructing the triangle do.

C
a b
B
c A

3
So:

~a × ~b = |a||b|sin(C) = 2A
~b × ~c = |b||c|sin(A) = 2A
~a × ~c = |a||c|sin(B) = 2A

Lengths of real shapes must be positive, so we can dispense with the absolute
values and then equate the LHS of all three above equations

[a b sin(C) = b c sin(A) = a c sin(B)]

Now divide by abc

1
[a b sin(C) = b c sin(A) = a c sin(B)] abc
sin(C) sin(A) sin(B)
c
= a
= b

And there you have it.