MTH 251 Lecture Notes - Lecture 36: Cartesian Coordinate System
Section Polar coordinates
Consider a point in the plane.
We call this point the pole (or the origin) and label it
We draw a ray extending from in any direction (but is usually drawn extending rightward).
We call this the polar axis .
If is any other point in the plane, we let be the distance from and we let be the
angle (usually in radians) between the polar axis and the line
The point is represented by where are the polar coordinates of
We continue the convention that an angle in the counter-clock wise direction is positive, and
negative in the clockwise direction.
Polar axis
Polar axis
Polar axis