How to Use cosine in a Sentence

cosine

noun
  • So our sum of three cosine waves gives us 1 + 1 + 1, or 3.
    — Leila Sloman, Quanta Magazine, 28 Jan. 2026
  • But their headline result was about Chowla’s cosine problem.
    — Leila Sloman, Quanta Magazine, 28 Jan. 2026
  • First, use each number in the set to define a cosine wave — 2 gives you cos(2x), for instance.
    — Leila Sloman, Quanta Magazine, 28 Jan. 2026
  • The smallest eigenvalue therefore tells you how low the cosine sum can get.
    — Leila Sloman, Quanta Magazine, 28 Jan. 2026
  • In fact, before last summer, the foursome had never even heard of Chowla’s cosine problem.
    — Leila Sloman, Quanta Magazine, 28 Jan. 2026
  • The stronger the cosine transformation, the more compressed the final result.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 17 June 2025
  • Similarly, a sum of 10 million cosine waves has a maximum of 10 million.
    — Leila Sloman, Quanta Magazine, 28 Jan. 2026
  • Shkredov, a number theorist, pointed out that Chowla’s cosine problem could be reformulated in terms of graphs.
    — Leila Sloman, Quanta Magazine, 28 Jan. 2026
  • And yet, for the past 20 years, Ruzsa’s result has represented the pinnacle of progress on Chowla’s cosine problem.
    — Leila Sloman, Quanta Magazine, 28 Jan. 2026
  • For decades, mathematicians struggled with Chowla’s cosine problem.
    — Leila Sloman, Quanta Magazine, 28 Jan. 2026
  • The Fourier transform does this for all possible frequencies, multiplying the original function by both sine and cosine waves.
    — Shalma Wegsman, Quanta Magazine, 3 Sep. 2025
  • Now, Jin hopes that the specific connection between Chowla’s cosine problem and MaxCut hints at something broader.
    — Leila Sloman, Quanta Magazine, 28 Jan. 2026
  • As Laplace had suggested in 1775, each tidal constituent can be represented as a repeating cosine curve, but those curves are specific to a location and can be calculated only through the collection of tidal data.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 2 June 2024
  • According to the latest bound, proved in 2004 by Imre Ruzsa of the Alfréd Rényi Institute of Mathematics in Hungary, a sum of 1020 cosines — that’s a 1 with 20 zeros after it, about the number of molecules in a cubic inch of air — must have a minimum value smaller than about −7.
    — Leila Sloman, Quanta Magazine, 28 Jan. 2026

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'cosine.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: