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In mathematics, a spherical coordinate system specifies a given point in three-dimensional space by using a distance and two angles as its three coordinates. These are the radial distance r along the line connecting the point to a fixed point called the origin; the polar angle θ between this radial line and a given polar axis; [a] and
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 ...
Note: This page uses common physics notation for spherical coordinates, in which is the angle between the z axis and the radius vector connecting the origin to the point in question, while is the angle between the projection of the radius vector onto the x-y plane and the x axis. Several other definitions are in use, and so care must be taken ...
This article uses the standard notation ISO 80000-2, which supersedes ISO 31-11, for spherical coordinates (other sources may reverse the definitions of θ and φ): . The polar angle is denoted by [,]: it is the angle between the z-axis and the radial vector connecting the origin to the point in question.
Great circles in many ways play the same logical role in spherical geometry as lines in Euclidean geometry, e.g., as the sides of (spherical) triangles. This is more than an analogy; spherical and plane geometry and others can all be unified under the umbrella of geometry built from distance measurement , where "lines" are defined to mean ...
In spherical geometry, a spherical circle (often shortened to circle) is the locus of points on a sphere at constant spherical distance (the spherical radius) from a given point on the sphere (the pole or spherical center).
In the theory of Lorentzian manifolds, spherically symmetric spacetimes admit a family of nested round spheres.In such a spacetime, a particularly important kind of coordinate chart is the Schwarzschild chart, a kind of polar spherical coordinate chart on a static and spherically symmetric spacetime, which is adapted to these nested round spheres.
Radial distance, typically denoted r or ρ , is the distance from the origin to a point along the radial dimension in a: Polar coordinate system; Spherical coordinate ...