# Normalize infinite range into finite one

First of all; I'm a programmer, not a mathematician so please excuse the informality of my math-vocabulary.

I have a series of slopes, calculated out of random angles (their tangents). These angles will always be located in the I and IV quadrants i.e. there are no angles "pointing to the left".

As you probably know, the tangent curve goes from -infinity to +infinity in this range.

I need to normalize the slopes into a range from -1 to 1. This means that the slope of an angle approaching (pi/2) should get closer and closer to 1 instead of infinity.

I would like to know how to do this in two ways:

1) Preserving a smaller tangent curve in my new range

2) Making it a linear range

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It isn't clear to me what exactly you want to do. Why not just normalize the angles to be from -1 to 1? – Bitwise Sep 25 '12 at 22:10

I'm not sure if this is what you're looking for, but you could first normalize your point so that it is at distance $1$ from the origin, then take the resulting $y$-coördinate.
In other words, given $(x,y)$, you would be calculating $\frac{y}{\sqrt{x^2+y^2}}$, which is the sine of the angle from the $x$-axis.
To put it another way, if you are not given the point $(x,y)$ but only the tangent $t$, you can calculate $\frac{t}{\sqrt{t^2+1}}$. – Théophile Sep 28 '12 at 18:13