There are many reasons why we use radian measure.  One reason is to make the following limit equal to one.

This can only occur if is in radians. We will show why that is in this post.

This identity is useful:

We can separate this limit into two parts. One part depends on multiplied by and another part that depends on and multiplied by .

Now we just need to find the two limits below because the limit depends on and not on and so and can be taken out.

Both of these limits are of the type zero over zero. We will now show that depends on .

Limit is limit multiplied by an expression which tends to zero.

So if limit is finite then limit will be zero.

Now our next step is to see if limit is finite. I am going to show this fact numerically. We are going to calculate the sine of very small angles since our limit is when the angle is approaching zero.

TOOLBOX:

• Seed:

With this toolbox I can get by the following:

Let then we have the following . We can solve for using this equation.

We can now get by using the third part of the tool box and then repeat the whole process to get . We can continue this as much as we want. The table below is constructed using this method.

The fraction looks like it is converging. So we can reasonably say that limit is finite making limit zero. This makes the derivative of look like the following:

This constant is the result when we take the where is in degrees . The way we measure h is pretty arbitrary. We just assign the number 360 to a full circle. What if we assume the limit approaches one? If we do this the derivative is just . Then we can work backwards and see how the way we measure an angle changes. We will call this new way of measuring the angle the radian .

Let the following be true:

Then the following is true for very small :

We take the smallest angle from the above table:

Since the angle is pretty small we can make the following approximation:

Now we have a correspondence between angles in degrees and angles in radians. Since both numbers represent the same angle they should have the same ratio to the whole circle angle.

is approximately the number assigned to the whole circle in radian measure.

Wait a minute isn’t

There is a way to show this geometrically… but I’m going to stop here.