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the point's direction from the pole relative to the direction of the polar axis, a ray drawn from the pole. The distance from the pole is called the radial coordinate, radial distance or simply radius, and the angle is called the angular coordinate, polar angle, or azimuth. [1] The pole is analogous to the origin in a Cartesian coordinate system.
The polar angle is denoted by [,]: it is the angle between the z-axis and the radial vector connecting the origin to the point in question. The azimuthal angle is denoted by φ ∈ [ 0 , 2 π ] {\displaystyle \varphi \in [0,2\pi ]} : it is the angle between the x -axis and the projection of the radial vector onto the xy -plane.
Once the radius is fixed, the three coordinates (r, θ, φ), known as a 3-tuple, provide a coordinate system on a sphere, typically called the spherical polar coordinates. The plane passing through the origin and perpendicular to the polar axis (where the polar angle is a right angle) is called the reference plane (sometimes fundamental plane).
As φ has a range of 360° the same considerations as in polar (2 dimensional) coordinates apply whenever an arctangent of it is taken. θ has a range of 180°, running from 0° to 180°, and does not pose any problem when calculated from an arccosine, but beware for an arctangent.
Coordinate conversion is composed of a number of different types of conversion: format change of geographic coordinates, conversion of coordinate systems, or transformation to different geodetic datums. Geographic coordinate conversion has applications in cartography, surveying, navigation and geographic information systems.
A complex number can also be defined by its geometric polar coordinates: the radius is called the absolute value of the complex number, while the angle from the positive real axis is called the argument of the complex number. The complex numbers of absolute value one form the unit circle.
x is the argument of the complex number (angle between line to point and x-axis in polar form). The notation is less commonly used in mathematics than Euler's formula, e ix, which offers an even shorter notation for cos x + i sin x, but cis(x) is widely used as a name for this function in software libraries.
In this polar decomposition, the unit circle has been replaced by the line x = 1, the polar angle by the slope y/x, and the radius x is negative in the left half-plane. If x 2 ≠ y 2, then the unit hyperbola x 2 − y 2 = 1 and its conjugate x 2 − y 2 = −1 can be used to form a polar decomposition based on the branch of the unit hyperbola ...