Eli5: Why are circles specifically 360 degrees and not 100?
In: Mathematics
Having 100 degrees doesn’t make things any easier, really. We mostly talk about angles in triangles, or other acute angle situations, so then you’d mostly have numbers like 25, which still aren’t round and which are harder to subdivide into the angles we normally consider significant like halves and thirds of a right angle.
The only subdivision of a circle that naturally falls out of circle math is radians, where one radian is the angle whose arc length is equal to the radius, and a full circle is 2π. But that’s a pain in casual conversation or for specifying any angle that isn’t a simple fraction of π, so we might as well go with whatever we’re used to using, which happens to be 360 degrees.
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