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This shows that a great circle is, with respect to distance measurement on the surface of the sphere, a circle: the locus of points all at a specific distance from a center. Each point is associated with a unique great circle, called the polar circle of the point, which is the great circle on the plane through the centre of the sphere and ...
Circles on the sphere are, like circles in the plane, made up of all points a certain distance from a fixed point on the sphere. The intersection of a sphere and a plane is a circle, a point, or empty. [18] Great circles are the intersection of the sphere with a plane passing through the center of a sphere: others are called small circles.
A circle with non-zero geodesic curvature is called a small circle, and is analogous to a circle in the plane. A small circle separates the sphere into two spherical disks or spherical caps, each with the circle as its boundary. For any triple of distinct non-antipodal points a unique small circle passes through all three.
For example, one sphere that is described in Cartesian coordinates with the equation x 2 + y 2 + z 2 = c 2 can be described in spherical coordinates by the simple equation r = c. (In this system—shown here in the mathematics convention—the sphere is adapted as a unit sphere, where the radius is set to unity and then can generally be ignored ...
A diagram illustrating great-circle distance (drawn in red) between two points on a sphere, P and Q. Two antipodal points, u and v are also shown. The great-circle distance, orthodromic distance, or spherical distance is the distance between two points on a sphere, measured along the great-circle arc between them. This arc is the shortest path ...
In mathematics, an n-sphere or hypersphere is an -dimensional generalization of the -dimensional circle and -dimensional sphere to any non-negative integer . The circle is considered 1-dimensional, and the sphere 2-dimensional, because the surfaces themselves are 1- and 2-dimensional respectively, not because they ...
Every circle in Euclidean 3-space is a great circle of exactly one sphere. The disk bounded by a great circle is called a great disk: it is the intersection of a ball and a plane passing through its center. In higher dimensions, the great circles on the n-sphere are the intersection of the n-sphere with 2-planes that pass through the origin in ...
Poloidal direction (red arrow) and toroidal direction (blue arrow) A torus of revolution in 3-space can be parametrized as: [2] (,) = (+ ) (,) = (+ ) (,) = using angular coordinates θ, φ ∈ [0, 2π), representing rotation around the tube and rotation around the torus's axis of revolution, respectively, where the major radius R is the distance from the center of the tube to ...