Current Events > Is there a 3D coordinate system that uses 3 angles?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Rectangular coordinates use 3 lengths, polar coordinates use 2 lengths and 1 angle, and spherical coordinates use 1 length and 2 angles. One would think that 3 angles would at least be on the table.

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How would it work?

Angles can only tell you the direction one point is in from another, not how far away it is. You need at least one length to figure that out.

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A Euler Angle uses 3 angles to describe the orientation of a rigid body with respect to a coordinate system.

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But more to answer the OP, with 1 length and 3 angles you can map things onto the surface of a 4-dimension sphere (hypersphere).

edit: you can increase the number of angles arbitrarily to go up dimensions.

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Mr Hangman posted...

That would required the system to have two reference points. All the systems you list have an origin, a zero point. A 3-angle system would need an origin and a second fixed point to measure from. That would be a pretty unnatural system in most situations.

Thinking about it though, it kind of reminds me of how you measure stars. You need to record their angle 6 months apart, using the parallax of the Earth's orbit to get a small deviation. I'm not sure how astronomers format that data, but it's the closest thing I can think of where something like this might make sense.

You are getting a Euler Angel when you measure stars like that, it's to model them in 3d. It's like in Stargate where you need 6 points to locate a star.

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