High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Moment of inertia, also called mass moment of inertia, rotational inertia, or the angular mass, (SI units kg·m2) is a measure of an object's resistance to changes in its rotation rate. It is the rotational analog of mass, the inertia of a rigid rotating body with respect to its rotation. The moment of inertia plays much the same role in rotational dynamics as mass does in linear dynamics, determining the relationship between angular momentum and angular velocity, torque and angular acceleration, and several other quantities. The symbol I and sometimes J are usually used to refer to the moment of inertia or polar moment of inertia. While a simple scalar treatment of the moment of inertia suffices for many situations, a more advanced tensor treatment allows the analysis of such complicated systems as spinning tops and gyroscopic motion.