i'm stuck on the fact that why are'nt sin degrees and sin radians graph plot identical?

Question

to be honest why do we use radians at all ?.. i mean the basic problem came when i plotted sin in degrees on matlab..it gives a straight line to my surprise...but when done on radians..it gives the real required alternating waveform.
why is this so ?..
i know how they are related..like (1 degree * pi )180. but the question is..why do we really need radians ?.
thanks

Answer 1

radian unit is useful when angles are related to linear measurements..just like the length of an arc is equal to the product of radius and angle..but you cant use degrees for the angle but radian..



you may use a different software other than matlab that uses degrees instead of radians..matlab's syntax for angle measurement is radian..and you cant change that..

Answer 2

If you think of it, there's no inherent reason why we should divide a circle up into 360 degrees. That's a tradition we just happened to carry on from the Sumerians. But radians are based on properties of the unit circle.



In some situations, radians are much more simple to use than degrees. For example, the formulas for the area of a sector or the length of an arc are easier to write in terms of radians. It's also easier to see why they work.



Radians also make things easier to graph. The reason why a sine graph might look like a straight line if you're using degrees is because the length of one period of your wave would have to be 360 times as long as your height. It's still a sine wave, but if you use 1:1 ratios like this in your grid, you're only going to see a tiny part of the graph on your screen. Looking at it from this close up, it might APPEAR to be a straight line. But it's really just a zoom in on the sine wave.

Answer 3

well it due to the units! If you put the window from -360 degrees to 360 degrees, you will get exactly the same graph as the radians graph from -2 pi to 2 pi. Its just a different way to measure!!!

Answer 4

radians make it easier to calculate many things and used in many formulas other than trigonometric graphs. you'll understand more when you go to calculus.

Answer 5

yeah ummm I agree ummm whatever you said, and yeah I like apples to