I have been informed that on March 7th from 6:00am to 6:00pm Central Time Lamar University will be doing some maintenance to replace a faulty UPS component and to do this they will be completely powering down their data center.
Unfortunately, this means that the site will be down during this time. I apologize for any inconvenience this might cause.
Paul
February 18, 2026
Section 1.3 : Trig Functions
2. Determine the exact value of \(\displaystyle \sin \left( { - \frac{{4\pi }}{3}} \right)\) without using a calculator.
Show All Steps Hide All Steps
First we can notice that \( - \pi - \frac{\pi }{3} = - \frac{{4\pi }}{3}\) and so (remembering that negative angles are rotated clockwise) we can see that the terminal line for \( - \frac{{4\pi }}{3}\) will form an angle of \(\frac{\pi }{3}\) with the negative \(x\)-axis in the second quadrant and we’ll have the following unit circle for this problem.

The coordinates of the line representing \( - \frac{{4\pi }}{3}\) will be the same as the coordinates of the line representing \(\frac{\pi }{3}\) except that the \(x\) coordinate will now be negative. So, our new coordinates will then be \(\left( { - \frac{1}{2},\frac{{\sqrt 3 }}{2}} \right)\) and so the answer is,
\[\sin \left( { - \frac{{4\pi }}{3}} \right) = \frac{{\sqrt 3 }}{2}\]