Another silly question....

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CharlieK

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CharlieK
that there probably isn't an answer to, just a lot of speculation...

But why, is 0°/360° up, or north... When almost universally in mathematics, 0°/360° is where we consider 90°?

Was the first mathematician the feuding brother of the first navigational expert? No! THIS is how I'M doing it!
 
Not sure what you mean really, but 0 is the reference. In navigation that is north, I suppose in math if I understand what you mean the reference is a horizontal line.
 
I had this question before as well. Not sure I ever got an answer. What makes it a real pain is when you start programming and are trying to determine vectors and now everything is off pi/2 radians. Not to mention in math the angle increases as you go CCW, and in navigation, CW. Which makes it even MORE fun to try and program.
 
Salty said:
Not sure what you mean really, but 0 is the reference. In navigation that is north, I suppose in math if I understand what you mean the reference is a horizontal line.
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I'm not really talking about a reference line... Simply that in math, 0 is always considered to be to the right. Degrees of rotation, are generally known to go counter-clockwise. 0 in math, is 90 navigation... 90 in math, is 0/360 in navigation...
 
These numbers are based on the angular difference facing north on the prime meridian. If you are aligned exactly on the prime meridian traveling north, the angle is zero.
 
EdFred said:
I had this question before as well. Not sure I ever got an answer. What makes it a real pain is when you start programming and are trying to determine vectors and now everything is off pi/2 radians. Not to mention in math the angle increases as you go CCW, and in navigation, CW. Which makes it even MORE fun to try and program.
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After spending a few hours staring at charts, with plotter and E6-B... I was rotating a part in AutoCAD, and even though I've been using AutoCAD for 25 years, for some reason, in my mind, I fully expected it to turn to the right. After my initial surprise... I shook my head at myself.
 
CharlieK said:
After spending a few hours staring at charts, with plotter and E6-B... I was rotating a part in AutoCAD, and even though I've been using AutoCAD for 25 years, for some reason, in my mind, I fully expected it to turn to the right. After my initial surprise... I shook my head at myself.
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I've. Done. The. Same. Thing.
 
Clip4 said:
These numbers are based on the angular difference facing north on the prime meridian. If you are aligned exactly on the prime meridian traveling north, the angle is zero.
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I understand that, but... why? To be the devils advocate... why isn't north pointing east in the direction of the rising sun? Did a magnetic compass exist when the cardinal directions were recognized/realized? Maybe so?
 
because.....o_O


so....maybe you should invent your own coordinate system?
 
Maybe because the compass points north, that's why North is the 0 reference? Perhaps because a sundial moved left to right-"ish" (clockwise-ish) in the northern hemisphere the bearings of the compass directions were aligned with that.

Maybe it's math that has everything backwards.

(if I really wanted I could have typed this post as if it were authoritative, and probably convinced everyone this WAS the case :D)
 
CharlieK said:
I understand that, but... why? To be the devils advocate... why isn't north pointing east in the direction of the rising sun? Did a magnetic compass exist when the cardinal directions were recognized/realized? Maybe so?
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Maybe because compasses don’t point east. In 206 BC when the compass was invented, you kept things simple. It wasn’t until 1200 years later some guy wanted to base navigation on east.
 
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Clip4 said:
Maybe because compasses don’t point east. In 206 BC when the compass was invented, you kept things simple. It wasn’t until 1200 years later some guy wanted to base navigation on east.
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Ha! I thought you were just being facetious with the 206 BC! They have been around for longer than I thought!
 
CharlieK said:
I understand that, but... why? To be the devils advocate... why isn't north pointing east in the direction of the rising sun?
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The rising sun may vary between poles depending on the season.
 
Converting my magnetic variation lines to solar/seasonal variation lines as we speak... ;-)
 
Mathematical 0 is an abstract. It can be up, down, left, right and so on. It has no real direction associated with it, its just drawn as a vector left-to-right by most people for simplicity sake.
Magnetic 0 is a fixed point in space.

In reality though, even magnetic 0 is an abstract that is given a distinct direction by the orientation of maps and how we conceptualize the Earth's orientation in space.

Earth's orientation is also an abstract given meaning by its rotation around the Sun and its rotation around its own axis. That's why we have 0-180 Meridians for a total of 360 degrees but only 0-90 latitudes for a total of 180 degrees in latitude.

This goes on and on...

It all really just boils down to humans frame of reference based on our experiences in the natural world (such as gravity and our vertical/erect posture); if we walked on our hands and feet, what we currently consider above us would be "behind us" (located some distance away from our back as the point of reference) and in front of us would be what we currently consider "above us" (located some distance away from the top of our head as the point of reference).
 
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CharlieK said:
that there probably isn't an answer to, just a lot of speculation...

But why, is 0°/360° up, or north... When almost universally in mathematics, 0°/360° is where we consider 90°?

Was the first mathematician the feuding brother of the first navigational expert? No! THIS is how I'M doing it!
Click to expand...
I have wondered the same thing. I started programming CNC equipment in the 1980s and "0" degrees was always measured from the positive X axis. Geometry is stored in CAD/CAM systems in the same format. I actually learned navigation for boating on the great lakes around the same time period and had a dickens of a time keeping things straight. I have never heard the explanation either.
 
EdFred said:
I had this question before as well. Not sure I ever got an answer. What makes it a real pain is when you start programming and are trying to determine vectors and now everything is off pi/2 radians. Not to mention in math the angle increases as you go CCW, and in navigation, CW. Which makes it even MORE fun to try and program.
Click to expand...

In programming, when writing decent code , everything is relative anyway so really you can write code using any coordinate system you prefer ( as long as you are not mixing them ) and then just do the transformation at the end to whatever display/coordinate system you are outputting to.
 
Warmi said:
In programming, when writing decent code , everything is relative anyway so really you can write code using any coordinate system you prefer ( as long as you are not mixing them ) and then just do the transformation at the end to whatever display/coordinate system you are outputting to.
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So **I** could track what was going on I converted from navigation to methematical, did all the calculations and then back. It was too hard for me to error check waiting until the end.
 
North being zero degrees makes sense because as others have pointed out, a magnetic compass needle points north (or south, but the first compass makers lived in the northern hemisphere). Why trigonometry uses zero pointing right I don't know, but there's probably an equally sensible reason. I'm comfortably using either system, though when I was writing a program recently to analyze GPS tracks it was a constant PITA to convert back and forth and keep track of which quadrant I was in.
 
I always just figured that the people who invented the compass weren’t mathematicians. They were sailors and more interested in practical art of getting around than theory.

The conventions of math came later. Why didn’t they follow the rules of compasses? Probably because they were mathematicians and not sailors, although it could also be argued that the xy graph and trig lends itself to how they represent.

Computers are the real Johnny come lately and they seem to do things not quite eating like either one.
 
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