Mistakes regarding polar coordinates

• The most common mistake is to confuse Cartesian with polar when plotting a graph. For example: everyone is familiar with (x, y). Therefore a common mistake is to think that radius goes along x and angle is somewhere along y. Suppose we have (2, 45°). A clueless person thinks x = 2 and y = 45. I have to admit here that I made this mistake and more than once. I think that the origin of this mistake is, ironically, the fact that, a lot of times, polar coordinates are overlapped with the Cartesian coordinates in the same way that the figure above shows. This is done mostly due to the fact that it's easier to think on distances with XY coordinates.