In mathematics, the Jacobi elliptic functions are a set of basic elliptic functions. They are found in the description of the motion of a pendulum (see also pendulum (mathematics)), as well as in the design of electronic elliptic filters. While trigonometric functions are defined with reference to a circle, the Jacobi elliptic functions are a generalization which refer to other conic sections, the ellipse in particular. The relation to trigonometric functions is contained in the notation, for example, by the matching notation for . The Jacobi elliptic functions are used more often in practical problems than the Weierstrass elliptic functions as they do not require notions of complex analysis to be defined and/or understood. They were introduced by . Carl Friedrich Gauss had already studied special Jacobi elliptic functions in 1797, the lemniscate elliptic functions in particular, but his work was published much later. There are twelve Jacobi elliptic functions denoted by , where and are any of the letters , , , and . (Functions of the form are trivially set to unity for notational completeness.) is the argument, and is the parameter, both of which may be complex. In fact, the Jacobi elliptic functions are meromorphic in both and . The distribution of the zeros and poles in the -plane is well-known. However, questions of the distribution of the zeros and poles in the -plane remain to be investigated. In the complex plane of the argument , the twelve functions form a repeating lattice of simple poles and zeroes. Depending on the function, one repeating parallelogram, or unit cell, will have sides of length or on the real axis, and or on the imaginary axis, where and are known as the quarter periods with being the elliptic integral of the first kind. The nature of the unit cell can be determined by inspecting the "auxiliary rectangle" (generally a parallelogram), which is a rectangle formed by the origin at one corner, and as the diagonally opposite corner.