what me know what i'm talking about just commiting a bit of original research and shouting history anyway i did a bit of digging in google which turned up gregory st vincent gr goire de saint vincent with the greeks described a spiral using an angle and a radius vector but it was st vincent and cavalieri who simultaneously and independently introduced them as a separate coordinate system in an article the origin of polar coordinates j j coolidge refers to the priority dispute between cavalieri and st vincent over their discovery st vincent wrote about this new coordinate system in a letter to grienberger in and published the process in on the other hand cavalieri's publication appeared in and the corrected version in and milestones in the history of thematic cartography development of the use of polar coordinates for the representation of functions newton's method of fluxions was written about but not published until jacob bernoulli published a derivation of the idea in p attributes the development of polar coordinates to fontana with no date isaac newton england and gregorio fontana and jacob bernoulli p is probably too early would probably be more appropriate there are earlier references to hipparchus bc regarding the use of polar coordinates in establishing stellar positions and abu arrayhan muhammad ibn ahmad al biruni regarding the use of three rectangular coordinates to establish a point in space use of polar coordinates in a graph frequency of wind directions l on lalanne france la habra high school math history timeline jacob bernoulli invents polar coordinates a method of describing the location of points in space using angles and distances sherlock holmes in babylon and other tales of mathematical history has a section newton as an originator of polar coordinates jacob amsler amsler invented the polar planimeter a device for measuring areas enclosed by plane curves it was based on polar coordinates whereas earlier instruments were based on cartesian coordinates in amsler published a paper ber das planimeter in which he gave details of his idea as mahoney writes in amsler's planimeter adapted easily to the determination of static and inertial moments and to the coefficients of fourier series it proved especially useful to shipbuilders and railway engineers so it seems there is considerable different accounts of their introduction and quite a few notable applications