I know they mean "rotate this way" and "rotate that way," respectively, but is there a standard name for "rotational direction?"
"omega" often measures the angle, but what variable name usually designates the direction of rotation?
(I'm naming variables for my program that will have to rotate things in a Cartesian plane)
On
As I've always understood it, the idea comes from the cross product and angular momentum. If we can agree on an 'up' direction (the positive z axis in a coordinate plane), then we say a rotation is positive if the direction of its angular momentum, as determined by the right hand rule, is upward (that is, has any positive z component). This does end up agreeing with the winding number argument - counterclockwise in the xy plane is positive.
As I type this, it makes me wonder - what if it's perpendicular to the z axis? Well, I don't know. I suppose I'm out of luck. But such strange times might call for strange measures, and we could actually describe the angular momentum vector to remove all doubt - or we could just change coordinates so that 'up' isn't quite how we thought of it before.
May be you should read this.http://www.xamplified.com/positive-and-negative-angles/
*As per my understanding of "rotate this way" and "rotate that way" you are referring to terminal sides above and below the x-axis.When i first took trig this is what i was taught. *