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Sine wave

The sine wave or sinusoid is a function that occurs often in mathematics, physics, signal processing, audition, electrical engineering, and many other fields. Its most basic form is:  

which describes a wavelike function of time (t) with:  

peak deviation from center  = A (aka amplitude)  

angular frequency (radians per second)  

phase = θ When the phase is non-zero, the entire waveform appears to be shifted in time by the amount θ/ω seconds. A negative value represents a delay, and a positive value represents a "head-start".  

The sine wave is important in physics because it retains its wave shape when added to another sine wave of the same frequency and arbitrary phase. It is the only periodic waveform that has this property. This property leads to its importance in Fourier analysis and makes it acoustically unique.  

The graphs of the sine and cosine functions are sinusoids of different phases.  

The oscillation of an undammed spring-mass system around the equilibrium is a sine wave.