Why are there 360° in a circle? | Hacker News Reader

Why are there 360° in a circle?

twitter.com

20 pointsvector_spaces12 comments

I clipped this from Fall of Civilizations - The Sumerians - Fall of the First Cities. I'm not sure if they got it right, but it sounds good. (not monetizing, so not promoting)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuIevAo8yDw

Full show

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2lJUOv0hLA

That is a fantastic podcast series

It really is. They just released a new one last month. It helped me a lot to look at a topographical map and river networks of India to understand what was happening.

14. Vijayanagara - The Last Emperors of South India

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GV2piw94DpM

When I worked for a company that wrote a lot of navigation-related software we fixed circles to have 1024 degrees (but we called them "bams" to avoid confusion)

What were the advantages of using that number of degrees?

I would guess the ability to peg things to powers of 2 with enough granularity that a series of bit shifts was more efficient than the alternatives for the application. Speculating, but it reminded me of a similar tactic I saw in demoscene code.

You can fit a 3D vector into 32 bits.

You can bisect it 10 times.

Nice.

Now do "why can't Pi be == 3?"

It has been tried, but failed to pass in a bill in Indiana in 1897. [0]

Such a bill would probably pass now in Indiana, and many other states, given the wishful thinking on so many other issues that can't be resolved by legislation, but that's not for the want of trying.

[0]https://www.straightdope.com/21341975/did-a-state-legislatur...

Pass it on to the Fed reserve. If anyone can massage things to mean other things, they can.

>There seems to be some bemusement in the media about efforts to decolonise the curriculum in mathematics. Some think this means removing concepts from the curriculum to replace them by others. Let’s look at one example. Why are there 360° in a circle?

Maybe it's too early in the morning, but what does it mean to "decolonize the curriculum in mathematics"? And what does the series of tweets have to do with it?

It reads like a series of tweets explaining that early human civilizations approximated things as best they could, and future civilizations have continually improved upon that. Am I missing something?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com