# Was 360 considered a magic number, possibly?

The number $$360$$ as the number of units into which the circle is divided has some nice properties:

• it has as many divisors as a number of its size can have

• it's nearly the number of days per year

But none of these properties is really "magic", so the number $$360$$ isn't really distinguished mathematically and may have been chosen mainly for practical and logistic reasons.

I wonder if there is evidence that the number $$360$$ has been seen as a somehow "magic" number by ancient mathematicians. For example, it is the number that combines the first three natural numbers $$1,2,3$$ with the first three prime numbers $$2,3,5$$:

$$360 = 2^3 \cdot 3^2 \cdot 5^1$$

Note, that the number $$12$$ (which happens to be the number of months per year) is the number that combines the first two natural numbers $$1,2$$ with the first two prime numbers $$2,3$$:

$$12 = 2^2 \cdot 3^1$$

And $$2$$ (the number of halves of the year) is just

$$2 = 2^1$$

Note, that OEIS knows the sequence $$2,12,360$$ under the name of Chernoff sequence but hasn't got a lot to tell about it.