The shaft is one of the most important parts of the machine, and it is used to transmit torque. However, the shaft does not always rotate at constant angular velocity due to sudden acceleration or deceleration or due to unstable current. The rotation of the shaft varies with time, which causes torsional vibration on the rotating shaft. To the best of the author’s knowledge, there is no study on designing a symmetric tuned mass damper (STMD) for the rotating shaft with variable angular velocity. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to design an optimal STMD to reduce torsional vibration for the rotating shaft with variable angular velocity. First, the author designs an optimal STMD for the rotating shaft by the fixed-points theory. Second, the optimal parameters of the STMD are obtained by using the minimum quadratic torque method. The optimal parameters of the STMD are defined in analytic and explicit forms, helping researchers to easily design an optimal STMD when applying to reduce torsional vibration for the rotating shaft. Finally, to evaluate the reliability of the designed optimal STMD, Maple software is used to simulate the vibration of the rotating shaft attached with the optimal STMD, as well as to help the readers to have a visual view on the effect of reducing torsional vibration of the rotating shaft.