What are "tan" and "atan"? As the title says, I'm confused on what tan and atan are. I'm writing a program in Java and I came across these two mathematical functions. I know tan stands for tangent but if possible could someone please explain this to me. I have not taken triginomotry yet (I've taken up to Algebra 1) so I don't really need a very in depth explanation since i wouldnt understand but just a simple one so i could move on with my program would be great! Thanks in advanced. Also if possible could someone possibly give me a link to an image/example of a tangent and atan.  

A quick google search of "java atan"  would tell you that it stands for "arctangent", which is the inverse of tangent.  Tangent is first understood as a ratio of non-hypotenuse sides of a right triangle. Given a non-right angle $x$ of a right triangle, $\tan(x)$ is the ratio $\frac{o}{a}$ where $o$ is the length of the leg of the triangle opposite $x$ and $a$ is the length of the leg adjacent to $x$. Arctangent takes the ratio as an input and returns the angle. 
I don't think any single answer to your post will give you a complete understanding of tangent and arctangent. To get that, I recommend spending some time with sine, cosine, tangent and the unit circle. Here is a link to an image http://www.emanueleferonato.com/images/trigo.png   that uses an angle $A$ and triangle sides $a,o,h$. In the context of that photo, $\arctan\left(\frac{\text{opposite}}{\text{adjacent}}\right) = A$
