How can I evaluate an expression like $\sin(3\pi/2)$ on a calculator and get an answer in terms of $\pi$? I have an expression like this that I need to evaluate:
$$16\sin(2\pi/3)$$
According to my book the answer is $8\sqrt{3}$. However, when I'm using my calculator to get this I get an answer like $13.86$. What I want to know, is it possible to make a calculator give the answer without evaluating $\pi$, so that $\pi$ is kept separate in the answer? And the same for in this case, $\sqrt{3}$. If the answer involves a square root, I want my calculator to say that, I don't want it to be evaluated.
I am using the TI-83 Plus if that makes a difference.

Here’s something I used to tell students that might help. Among the angles that you’re typically expected to know the trig. values for ($30,$ $45,$ $60$ degrees and their cousins in the other quadrants), the only irrational values for the sine, cosine, tangent have the following magnitudes:
$$\frac{\sqrt{2}}{2}, \;\; \frac{\sqrt{3}}{2}, \;\; \sqrt{3}, \;\; \frac{\sqrt{3}}{3}$$
Note that if you square each of these, you get:
$$\frac{1}{2}, \;\; \frac{3}{4}, \;\; 3, \;\; \frac{1}{3}$$
Now consider the decimal expansions of these fractions:
$$0.5, \;\; 0.75, \;\; 3, \;\; 0.3333…$$
The important thing to notice is that if you saw any of these decimal expansions, you’d immediately know its fractional equivalent. (O-K, most people would know it!)
Now you can see how to use a relatively basic calculator to determine the exact value of $\sin\left(2\pi / 3 \right).$ First, use your calculator to find a decimal for $\sin\left(2\pi / 3 \right).$ Using a basic calculator (mine is a TI-32), I get $0.866025403.$ Now square the result. Doing this, I get $0.75.$ Therefore, I know that the square of $\sin\left(2\pi / 3 \right)$ is equal to $\frac{3}{4},$ and hence $\sin\left(2\pi / 3 \right)$ is equal to $\sqrt{\frac{3}{4}}.$ The positive square root is chosen because I got a positive value for $\sin\left(2\pi / 3 \right)$ when I used my calculator. Finally, we can rewrite this as $\frac{\sqrt{3}}{\sqrt{4}}=\frac{\sqrt{3}}{2}.$
What follows are some comments I posted in sci.math (22 June 2006) about this method.
By the way, I used to be very concerned in the early days of calculators that students could obtain all the exact values of the $30,$ $45,$ and $60$ degree angles by simply squaring the calculator output, recognizing the equivalent fraction of the resulting decimal [note that the squares of the sine, cosine, tangent of these angles all come out to fractions that any student would recognize (well, they used to be able to recognize) from its decimal expansion], and then taking the square root of the fraction. As the years rolled by, I got to where I didn't worry about this at all, because even when I taught this method in class (to help students on standardized tests and to help them for other teachers who were even more insistent about using exact values than I was), the majority of my students had more trouble doing this than just memorizing the values!
