Timeline for How do the radian have a unit?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
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| Aug 12, 2017 at 13:22 | comment | added | badjohn | @StephenG No disagreement on the importance of radians in mathematics but the OP has a point. It doesn't need a unit in the way that velocity or area do. If we had not got into the habit of using degrees before realising that maths worked better in radians, we might not have felt the need fid the name. We would just say that the angle was $\frac{\pi}{2}$. | |
| Aug 12, 2017 at 13:15 | comment | added | garyp | I recently had an interesting discussion about Hertz. A document used Hz for frequency and rad/s for angular frequency. After some thought, we all kind-of agreed that using Hz for angular frequency (without a clear statement that it is angular frequency) is not a good idea. Hz is too strongly associated with frequency in our general opinion. | |
| Aug 12, 2017 at 13:14 | comment | added | StephenG - Help Ukraine | The radian has a very precise and well defined meaning in mathematics. It's a lot more than a label. Degrees are simply a human convenience and we've used many different units for human purposes (e.g. a gradian) but none work in the same fundamental way that radians do for mathematics. | |
| Aug 12, 2017 at 12:37 | history | answered | badjohn | CC BY-SA 3.0 |