Skip to Main Content
Trigonometry For Dummies, 3rd Edition
book

Trigonometry For Dummies, 3rd Edition

by Mary Jane Sterling
March 2023
Beginner content levelBeginner
400 pages
9h 38m
English
For Dummies
Content preview from Trigonometry For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Chapter 4

Dishing Out the Pi: Radians

IN THIS CHAPTER

Bullet Defining a radian

Bullet Converting degrees to radians and vice versa

Bullet Seeing situations where using radians is best

A person’s first introduction to angles is usually in terms of degrees. You probably have an idea of what a 30-degree angle looks like. (If not, review Chapter 3.) And even most middle-school students know that a triangle consists of 180 degrees. But most of the scientific community uses radians to measure angles and solve trig equations. Why change to radians? Why fix what ain’t broke? Read on.

What’s in a Radian?

A radian is much bigger than a degree. Early mathematicians decided on the size of a degree based on divisions of a full circle. A degree is the same as a slice that’s math of a circle. No one knows for sure how the choice of 360 degrees in a circle came to be adopted. In any case, 360 is a wonderful number, because you can divide it evenly by so many other numbers: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 24, 30, 36, 40, 45, 60, 72, 90, 120, 180, and 360. The early measures of time and distance relied on having ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Trigonometry For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Trigonometry For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Mary Jane Sterling

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781394168552Purchase Link