Hilbert space idempotents and involutions

Norms of idempotents, involutions, and the Hermitian and skew-Hermitian parts of involutions are shown to be elementary trigonometric functions of an angle between two subspaces of Hilbert space. When the spaces involved are nontrivial, the norm of a linear idempotent is the cosecant of the angle between its range and kernel; the norm of a linear involution is the cotangent of half the angle between the involution's eigenspaces.