Why 360° in a full turn?
By Woon Khang Tang (P3742) on Monday, February 12, 2001 - 09:06 pm :

Why we define one revolution as 360°? why not 100, or 400???

By Anonymous on Monday, February 12, 2001 - 09:10 pm :

Because 360 is extremely divisible.


It is nice to define one revolution to be 2π since then the length of a ϕ arc of a circle of radius r is rϕ.
By Oliver Samson (P3202) on Wednesday, February 14, 2001 - 08:56 pm :

I think originally it was because some ancient people guessed the number of days in a year to be about 360, so they thought that this way, we'd move about a degree around the sun every day, plus the reason already mentioned.

By Dave Sheridan (Dms22) on Thursday, February 15, 2001 - 10:20 am :

It was the Babylonians who gave us 360 degrees. This was split into smaller units, called minutes, and even smaller ones, called seconds. You can guess how many seconds there are in a minute! Thus 360 degrees corresponds to an hour. As has previously been mentioned, 360 has a lot of factors which is rather useful for coming up with smaller angles - just divide the circle into equal segments.

-Dave

By The Editor :

The Babylonian number system was based on 60s, which is probably another reason why they chose 360. You can read more about their number system here .