This article presents a task providing college students opportunities to build on their high school knowledge of trigonometry to explore parametric equations and inverse trigonometric relationships within a contextual learning ladder problem.

In this article we consider an example suitable for investigation in many mid and upper level undergraduate mathematics courses. Fourier series provide an excellent example of the differences between uniform and non-uniform convergence. We use Dirichlet's test to investigate the convergence of the Fourier series for a simple periodic saw tooth…