Simple way to translate degrees into radians?
Maths and statistics discussion, revision, exam and homework help.
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Simple way to translate degrees into radians?I'm doing edexcel c2 and have a table showing angles in degrees and radians, but the table is big and I won't have it in the exam. East way to convert degrees into radians anyone, and vice versa?
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Re: Simple way to translate degrees into radians?The brain-dead calculator method is:
The way to remember this is that
(which you should know anyway) so you need to multiply by 
or 
. To decide which one, it's fairly obvious that 180 is a lot bigger than 
, and any given angle is represented by 'more degrees than radians', so to go from radians to degrees you multiply by the top-heavy fraction, and to go from degrees to radians you multiply by the bottom-heavy fraction.
For most angles this brain-dead "hammer the calculator" method isn't very useful and you certainly won't learn much from it. But you should remember that
represents a full circle, so you can work out the conversions by taking appropriate fractions of this. For instance 90° is a quarter of a circle, and so it is 
radians. And 30° is a twelfth of a circle, so it is 
radians. And so on.
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Re: Simple way to translate degrees into radians?Oh thanks that makes so much sense now! I think my teacher tried explaining it like that but kind of failed.(Original post by nuodai)
The brain-dead calculator method is:
The way to remember this is that (which you should know anyway) so you need to multiply by or . To decide which one, it's fairly obvious that 180 is a lot bigger than , and any given angle is represented by 'more degrees than radians', so to go from radians to degrees you multiply by the top-heavy fraction, and to go from degrees to radians you multiply by the bottom-heavy fraction.
For most angles this brain-dead "hammer the calculator" method isn't very useful and you certainly won't learn much from it. But you should remember that represents a full circle, so you can work out the conversions by taking appropriate fractions of this. For instance 90° is a quarter of a circle, and so it is radians. And 30° is a twelfth of a circle, so it is radians. And so on.
