-1

Please Answer quickly i am really confused Most websites say that people thought a circle is 360 degrees because there are 360 dayes in a year but there are not they also say that the base number is 60 or 10 but i dont know what base number means and please tell me how this came to be and when ancient people found this out

MickG
  • 8,645
parsa
  • 25
  • Mathematicians generally don't use degrees after a while. A degree is just a unit, like an inch, where the most basic unit is "a whole circle angle." – Thomas Andrews Dec 26 '14 at 01:35
  • Some say it started with the Babylonians: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_mathematics – bubba Dec 26 '14 at 13:41

1 Answers1

1

There is no "found out". It is merely a definition. We could also define a circle to have 180 degrees, just like how in mathematics we often use 2pi radian instead of 360 degrees. It's just a useful definition because 360 has so many factors: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10... But the main reason we use 360 degrees is tradition. The ancient Greeks used 360 degrees, the Babylonians used 360 degrees, it just stuck.

Dasherman
  • 4,206
  • Maybe there is also the nice issues that 360 divides wholly into 2,3,4,5,6, 12, etc., so that many "common" fractions of 360 are integers. BEtter than starting with, say, 353 degrees so that half a circle is 176.5, etc. – RikOsuave Dec 26 '14 at 01:39