I was just wondering why we have 90° degrees for a perpendicular angle. Why not 100° or any other number?
What is the significance of 90° for the perpendicular or 360° for a circle?
I didn't ever think about this during my school time.
Can someone please explain it mathematically? Is it due to some historical reason?
On
I have heard that the ancient Babylonians used a base-$60$ numeral system with sub-base $10$.
Certainly such a system was used by Ptolemy in the second century AD. See Gerald Toomer's translation of Ptolemy's Almagest. In particular Ptolemy divided the circle into $360$ degrees. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptolemy%27s_table_of_chords, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almagest, and http://hypertextbook.com/eworld/chords.shtml .
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360 degrees is not the only choice. When using grads (also called gons) as a unit of angle, the full circle is 400 degrees and the right angle is 100 degrees. Grads are used in surveying and for example a theodolite, a surveying instrument, often has its measuring scale labeled in grads. It seems the unit was introduced along the metric system in an attempt to replace historical units, but only caught on in some fields.
360 is an incredibly abundant number, which means that there are many factors. So it makes it easy to divide the circle into $2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12,\ldots$ parts. By contrast, 400 gradians cannot even be divided into 3 equal whole-number parts. While this may not necessarily be why 360 was chosen in the first place, it could be one of the reasons we've stuck with the convention.
By the way, when working in radians, we just "live with" the fact that most common angles are fractions involving $\pi$. There's a small group of people who prefer to use a constant called $\tau$, which is just $2\pi$. Then angles seem naturally to be divisions of the circle: The angle that divides a circle into $n$ equal parts is $\tau/n$ (radians).
Hope this helps!