Radian - Advantages of Measuring in Radians

Advantages of Measuring in Radians

In calculus and most other branches of mathematics beyond practical geometry, angles are universally measured in radians. This is because radians have a mathematical "naturalness" that leads to a more elegant formulation of a number of important results.

Most notably, results in analysis involving trigonometric functions are simple and elegant when the functions' arguments are expressed in radians. For example, the use of radians leads to the simple limit formula

which is the basis of many other identities in mathematics, including

Because of these and other properties, the trigonometric functions appear in solutions to mathematical problems that are not obviously related to the functions' geometrical meanings (for example, the solutions to the differential equation, the evaluation of the integral, and so on). In all such cases it is found that the arguments to the functions are most naturally written in the form that corresponds, in geometrical contexts, to the radian measurement of angles.

The trigonometric functions also have simple and elegant series expansions when radians are used; for example, the following Taylor series for sin x :

If x were expressed in degrees then the series would contain messy factors involving powers of π/180: if x is the number of degrees, the number of radians is y = πx /180, so

Mathematically important relationships between the sine and cosine functions and the exponential function (see, for example, Euler's formula) are, again, elegant when the functions' arguments are in radians and messy otherwise.