Ptolemy's table of chords to the arc angle in degrees as is to 3, or more precisely, the ratio can be made as close as desired to ≈ by making "θ" small enough. Thus, for the arc of °, the chord length is slightly more than the arc angle in degrees. As the arc increases, the ratio of the chord to the arc decreases. When the arc reaches 60°, the chord length is exactly equal to the number of degrees in the arc, i.e. chord 60° = 60. For arcs of more than 60°, the chord is less than the arc, until an arc
Degrees of freedom (statistics) the vectors of residuals are constrained to lie in a space of smaller dimension than the number of components in the vector. That smaller dimension is the number of degrees of freedom for error, also called residual degrees of freedom. Perhaps the simplest example is this. Suppose are random variables each with expected value μ, and let be the "sample mean." Then the quantities are residuals that may be considered estimates of the errors "X" − μ. The sum of the residuals (unlike the sum of the errors) is necessarily 0. If one knows the values of any "n" −