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Who named the radian ?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2016

Michael Cooper
Michael Cooper*
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, Computing and Science, Newnham Community College, LONDON E6 4ER
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Extract

While looking at old copies of the journal Nature I chanced upon correspondence regarding the origin of the word radian. Textbooks today simply state it is an angular measure and have no interest in, nor space for, the history of the word. The Oxford English Dictionary states that the word first appears in print in 1879 in the second edition of the Treatise on natural philosophy by William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) and Peter Guthrie Tait. In their discussion of angular velocity they wrote: “the usual unit angle is … that which subtends at the centre of a circle an arc whose length is equal to the radius. For brevity we shall call this angle a radian.”

Type
Research Article
Information
The Mathematical Gazette , Volume 76 , Issue 475 , March 1992 , pp. 100 - 101
Copyright
Copyright © The Mathematical Association 1992

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