Why do we use 360 when measuring angles?

Answer 1

The ancient Greeks used base 6 numbers and thought that the number 6 had some kind of power. This thinking was backed up by the number of days in a year. When the Ancients went about measuring the year, they watched the sun set each day over the horizon. Where it set, it would be marked on a circle. After a while, they noticed that about 360 of these evenly spaced marks would fill up a circle. Any rounding error is because of the power of the number 6 and 6*6=36 and so this was special too and the number of degrees of a circle became 360. 360/24=15degrees => the earth turns 15 degrees in an hour 60 seconds a minute, 60 minutes an hour => 3600 seconds and hour This is also why angles are measure by degrees (o), minutes ('), and seconds ("). 360 degrees is an arbitrary number that (roughly) matches the length of the year by chance. Gradients are another measurement of angle defined as there being 100 (an arbitrary number based on our number system) Gradients in a circle. A better mathematical measurement of angles is radians. There are pi~3.141 radians in a circle.