Thursday, 16 August 2018

trigonometry - Calculating value of textsinc(x), WolframAlpha and MATLAB give two different answers.




I need to evaluate the following:
23sinc(2π3(n4))13sinc(π3(n4))



for n=[0,...,8]



I don't have the sinc function in my casio fx so I wanted to use the fact that sinc(x)=sin(x)x and that sinc(0)=1
Hence, for n=0 I got
23sinc(2π3(4))13sinc(π3(4))=0.1378....



This seems to agree with wolfram alpha:







enter image description here






But then I checked the mark scheme on my past paper that the question is taken from, and there it says that I should've got 0.0093 so i put it in MATLAB:







enter image description here






...and it also says 0.0093.



So... which one of the two is correct? What's going on?


Answer



As it happens, there are apparently two different conventions for what the sinc(x) function actually denotes in terms of the sin(x) function. (I ran into this same confusion on my class on Fourier analysis.) The conventions you might see are




sinc(x)=sin(x)xorsinc(x)=sin(πx)πx



The latter is known as the "normalized sinc function," per Wikipedia. I don't know much about which is used more when, so I'll leave you with the Wikipedia article in that respect.



Checking your functions if interpreted in the latter way, i.e. for n=0



23(38π2)sin(8π23)13(34π2)sin(4π23)



Wolfram Alpha gives a value of 0.0093..., in agreement with your MATLAB answer. Indeed, as noted by Josh B. in the comments, MATLAB uses the latter convention.




I would assume, then, this is the source of the discrepancy.


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