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The radian, denoted by the symbol rad, is the unit of angle in the International System of Units (SI) and is the standard unit of angular measure used in many areas of mathematics. It is defined such that one radian is the angle subtended at the centre of a circle by an arc that is equal in length to the radius. [ 2 ]
The magnitude of an object's solid angle in steradians is equal to the area of the segment of a unit sphere, centered at the apex, that the object covers.Giving the area of a segment of a unit sphere in steradians is analogous to giving the length of an arc of a unit circle in radians.
This means that the SI steradian is the number of square radians in a solid angle equal to one square radian, which of course is the number one. It is useful to distinguish between dimensionless quantities of a different kind , such as the radian (in the SI, a ratio of quantities of dimension length), so the symbol sr is used.
The use of degrees is most common in geography, astronomy, and engineering, where radians are commonly used in mathematics and theoretical physics. The unit for radial distance is usually determined by the context, as occurs in applications of the 'unit sphere', see applications .
SI unit of measure alpha: alpha particle: angular acceleration: radian per second squared (rad/s 2) fine-structure constant: unitless beta: velocity in terms of the speed of light c: unitless beta particle: gamma: Lorentz factor: unitless photon: gamma ray: shear strain: radian heat capacity ratio
Degrees are traditionally used in navigation, surveying, and many applied disciplines, while radians are more common in mathematics and mathematical physics. [ 9 ] The angle φ is defined to start at 0° from a reference direction , and to increase for rotations in either clockwise (cw) or counterclockwise (ccw) orientation.
Download as PDF; Printable version ... This is a definition of the radian. If ... the curves and compute the length of the sides for a somewhat accurate measurement ...
provided the angle is measured in radians. Angles measured in degrees must first be converted to radians by multiplying them by / . These approximations have a wide range of uses in branches of physics and engineering, including mechanics, electromagnetism, optics, cartography, astronomy, and computer science.