cot
Abbreviation with 2 meanings
| Stands for | Cotangent |
|---|---|
| Meanings | 2 |
| Categories | Units & Measurements, Technology & Computing |
| Also written | CoT |
cot has two meanings. It stands for Cotangent (math) or Chain of thought (artificial intelligence).
Meanings of cot at a glance
| # | cot stands for | Context |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Cotangent | Units & Measurements › Math |
| 2 | Chain of thought | Technology & Computing › Artificial Intelligence |
1. Cotangent
Units & Measurements · Math Abbreviations
Reciprocal of tangent: cot θ = cos θ/sin θ, or adjacent over opposite. It equals the tangent of the complementary angle, which is where the "co" comes from.
Example: At 45°, tan and cot are both equal to 1.
Older and some European texts write ctg or cotg. Cotangent is undefined where sine is zero, and its derivative is −csc²x. Calculators rarely have a dedicated key, so it is computed as 1/tan.
2. Chain of thought (CoT)
Technology & Computing · Artificial Intelligence Abbreviations
A prompting technique and model behavior in which a language model writes out intermediate reasoning steps before its final answer, improving accuracy on math, logic and multi-step problems.
Example: Adding "think step by step" triggered CoT and fixed the model's arithmetic errors.
Described in a 2022 paper by Jason Wei and colleagues at Google, which showed gains from including worked examples in prompts. "Reasoning models" released from 2024 onward are trained to produce extended chains of thought before answering. Researchers debate how faithfully a written chain reflects the model's actual computation.
Related abbreviations
More math abbreviations
- Cor – Corollary
- cos – Cosine
- cosec – Cosecant
- cosh – Hyperbolic cosine
- CPCTC – Corresponding parts of congruent triangles are congruent
- csc – Cosecant
- deg – Degree (angle)
- det – Determinant
See all 91 math abbreviations →