Why circle is 360 degrees

The When and Where of Degrees As you probably know, these days we humans like to divide a circle up into pie-shaped wedges. Each of these wedges contains an angle at its vertex, and we say that the size of this angle is 1 degree. At least we know that it came to be a long, long time ago—as in 4 or 5 thousand years ago with the Babylonians, the Greeks, and perhaps other even more ancient groups. Got it? The Earth takes one year to orbit the Sun.

And a year is just a little more than days. That means that the Earth rotates on its axis a little more than times every year. And they then made a leap and decided to divide this circle on the sky—and all circles—into even parts so that the Sun would move through 1 part per day.

Each of these parts was dubbed 1 degree, thus giving us the idea that a circle contains degrees. Makes sense, right? And given that the ancient Babylonian and Persian calendars were both based upon day years, it seems likely that this simple astronomical observation is the reason a circle contains degrees. He provides clear explanations of math terms and principles, and his simple tricks for solving basic algebra problems will have even the most math-phobic person looking forward to working out whatever math problem comes their way.

George Cantor 1 suggested that its origin can be traced to the fact that the early Babylo- nians reckoned the year to consist of days during which the sum made a complete circle round the earth. This led to be division of the circle into degrees, each degree being the distance traversed by the sun in one day. A square is no more a circle than it is an equilateral triangle. The Mesopotamians passed their base numerical system to the ancient Egyptians, who used it to divide a circle into degrees, Mary Blocksma writes in her book Reading the Numbers.

The degree circle worked out great: The Egyptians loved perfect triangles, and exactly six of them fit into a circle. A circle has degrees, so if you want to express an angle in terms of a percentage, just divide the angle measurement in degrees by and multiply by In reverse, divide the percentage by and multiply by If a ray is placed so that its endpoint is on a line and the adjacent angles are equal, then they are right angles.

No, a triangle can never have 2 right angles. Does that make any more sense than , or any other number? Is there any logic involved in that particular number? As it has been replied here - on Wonder Quest webarchive link :.

They did not try to understand the motions physically. They did, however, notice the circular track of the Sun's annual path across the sky and knew that it took about days to complete one year's circuit. Consequently, they divided the circular path into degrees to track each day's passage of the Sun's whole journey.

This probably happened about BC. That's how we got a degree circle. Around BC, Egyptians divided the day into 24 hours, though the hours varied with the seasons originally. Greek astronomers made the hours equal. About to BC, the Babylonians subdivided the hour into base fractions: 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute.

The base 60 of their number system lives on in our time and angle divisions. An degree circle makes sense for base 10 people like ourselves. But the base Babylonians came up with degrees and we cling to their ways-4, years later.

Then, there's also this discussion on Math Forum :.