Well thank goodness it was the Sumerians and not the Egyptians, otherwise we would be using 365.
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they knew it was 365 (and some change) but 360 is a better number because it’s got more factors. like everybody else, they just periodically declared extra days/months to realign things
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Where is the proof for 2400BC? It was the Vedic Indians who conceived the celestial wheel of 360 spokes/degrees & 720 half degrees. They had a 360 day sacrificial year. This is explicit in the Rig veda(3000-1800BCE). Modern trigonometry-'sine' & 'cosine'-also came from India.
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sir, they will even say that vedic indians copied from sumerians. they are biased soldout eurocentric group. you cant expect truth from them. Asians should create their own intelligentsia to counter propangada by this group.
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It's also useful because 360 has so many factors that provide a larger number of easily definable units: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 24, 30, 36, 40, 45, 60, 72, 90, 120, and 180.
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And 360 is good for tracking the moon's cycles of 30-ish, and the moon was an important timepiece. 360 was multiple of base 60 which when having no modern number system was easy to divide things like wages for the individuals in a group or grain into smaller parcels.
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The fact that 360 is a highly composite number may have been a reason for defining a degree such that a full rotation is 360°. A highly composite number is a positive integer that has more divisors than any smaller positive integer. See https://oeis.org/A002182 for more details.
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Worth mentioning that 360 is 2*2*2*3*3*5, so it can be “split” conveniently in many ways (contrary to other potential approximations of the year’s duration in days)
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360 is a highly composite number, meaning it's divisible by more numbers than any positive integer less than it. These tend to be the best numbers for groups of things, 12, 24 and 60 also happen to be highly composite. That's why I'm sad that we're using the decimal system.
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But it feels somehow more natural. It is easier to remember that 90 is a right angle, rather than 1.5708 radians.
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Quite right, at least in normal life, but in mathematics, it's far easier to work with radians. Radians are the natural way of describing angles
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