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Try to remember what an inverse function is! We've seen before that an inverse function is when we reflect the function over the line .
However, simply defining the inverse trigonometric functions like this is not enough. For example, think about whether equals or . We must, therefore, define the inverse function such that it returns only one value (and thus is a function).
We know that on the unit circle, the values of are all different along the interval . Therefore, we can define the inverse function there, since then there is a one-to-one correspondence between an angle and a ratio of sides. By this definition, would equal rather than .
Similarly, we can define along the interval , and along the interval .

