Trigonometry developed from studying right triangles in ancient Egypt and Babylon, with early work done by Hipparchus and Ptolemy. It was further advanced by Indian, Islamic, and Chinese mathematicians. Key developments include Madhava's sine table, al-Khwarizmi's sine and cosine tables, and Shen Kuo and Guo Shoujing's work in spherical trigonometry. European mathematicians like Regiomontanus, Rheticus, and Euler established trigonometry as a distinct field and defined functions analytically. Trigonometry is now used in many areas beyond triangle calculations.