How did 360 come into picture ? what is the basis of 360 ? Will it be more of advantage if circles were made of 1000 or 100 degrees ?
You can thank the Babylonians for that. They had a sexagesimal (base 60) number system. The number is also credited because there are about 360 days in a year. So, the question is did the base 60 number system come before the realization of 360 days in a year or vice versa? The chicken and the egg is easy but this is a touch more complicated. Oh. I believe they also thought there were 12 planets. 12*5=60. You have to realize that back in those days patterns were considered magical. Secret codes abound and were thought to be the means of controlling the universe. In some ways they were right. We inherited some of the more rational "magic" of the Babylonians. The 360 degree circle for instance. As far as the advantages, I'm sure that the mathematicians will speak up in their own time, but I've read that an advantage of a base 60 system is that it has so many divisors. This makes it easy to perform arithmetic operations with fractions. 60 is the smallest numbers to be divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. That's something interesting there.
I think that the ~360 day calendar would come first. You main reason for a calendar is crops (seasons) and your main guide is the sky (sun). If you had a calendar much different than 360 days it wouldn't be as much use to an agricultural society.
yeah, 360 days in the year is based on the actual length of the year, not on the babylonian number system. what invert_nexus was thinking of is the number of minutes and seconds in an hour, these are done base 60 because of the babylonians, along with the number of degrees in a circle. but changing number system can't change the number of days in a year
one of the nice thing about 360 is that it is divisible by 2, 3, and 5, whereas powers of ten are only divisible by 2 and 5. thus the 30-60-90 triangle, in units one 1000th of a circle, would be 250/3-500/3-250. that's just not as nice, and this is the most important triangle for trigonometry, after the 45-45-90 triangle, probably. but anyway, other units do exist. they are called mils, and there are 1600 of them in a right angle, so 64 000 in a revolution. there are also grads, where each right angle is divided into 100, so that there are 400 grads in a revolution. there are also radians and degrees, as you probably know.
Interesting post as I have been doing some research myself on the matter of the number of planets. Some documentation indicated the nine known planets that we are familiar with, but included the sun and our moon in the listThis makes it more likely they were describing the solar system rather than counting planets as we know them The twelth planet, wher is it? All I can do is reccomend a book, "The Twelth Planet" by Zacheria Siltchin. In any event, the Baylonian culture is more confusing to modern scholars as from the beginning of their culture measured to some 5000 BC the accelerated rise to sohphistication defies modern uinderstandings of the development of societies, which basically assumes some lumbering evolutionary model. This is grossly inappropriate, though i suspect the alternative is a bit unnerving, as if there was some kind of advanced sophistication that was performing some educaional tasks. In a flash, beyond any conceivable model known, relativiely speaking, the Babalonians had a rapidly developed society: laws, agriculture, educational institutions, sophisticated religion, shipping, medicine, arts, literature, commerce, architecture, sciene, astronomy, you name it. This is my understanding also. The foot-mile is also there. eg: 5280/12 = 440 5280/60 = 88 360 deg/2 pi radians 360/60 = 6. the 60 degree trangle is equilateral and see all the nie numbers using 12, 60, and associated number re geometry. 12 inches/foot there is also a 5/8 as the golden ratio there floating around somewhere. geistkiesel
