Introduction to Cylindrical Coordinates
What are cylindrical coordinates? A coordinate system is a system that provides a way to describe points and other features of geometric figures in Euclidean space. Generally the best coordinate system is that system which adequately does the job in simplest fashion. In this article, we will use (r, Φ, z) for our new coordinate system. Many use this, but others use a different assortment of letters, unfortunately. Forewarned is forearmed. Cylindrical Coordinates - Introspection When we're working in two dimension, we are able to draw our coordinate axes using the sheet of the paper, representing a plane. Two orthogonal axes are drawn, one horizontal the other vertical. When using r and Φ the way we view the axes is really different from how we view them when they represent x…