LATEX has a command for pretty much every useless symbol known to man, but it doesn’t have one for something I would consider pretty much essential… The degree symbol

You can write a circle in suberscript using math mode: ^\circ

The obvious thing to do is to define a command that writes a degree symbol when used with \degree as it should be. Just add before the document starts this line…

\newcommand{\degree}{\ensuremath{^\circ}}

This can be used in math mode as well as outside of it.