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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 ...
The haversine formula determines the great-circle distance between two points on a sphere given their longitudes and latitudes.Important in navigation, it is a special case of a more general formula in spherical trigonometry, the law of haversines, that relates the sides and angles of spherical triangles.
Great-circle navigation or orthodromic navigation (related to orthodromic course; from Ancient Greek ορθός (orthós) 'right angle' and δρόμος (drómos) 'path') is the practice of navigating a vessel (a ship or aircraft) along a great circle. Such routes yield the shortest distance between two points on the globe. [1]
Ptolemy used a circle of diameter 120, and gave chord lengths accurate to two sexagesimal (base sixty) digits after the integer part. [2] The chord function is defined geometrically as shown in the picture. The chord of an angle is the length of the chord between two points on a unit circle separated by that central angle.
The shortest distance along the surface of a sphere between two points on the surface is along the great-circle which contains the two points. The great-circle distance article gives the formula for calculating the shortest arch length on a sphere about the size of the Earth. That article includes an example of the calculation.
The distances between the centers of the nearer and farther circles, O 2 and O 1 and the point where the two outer tangents of the two circles intersect (homothetic center), S respectively can be found out using similarity as follows: Here, r can be r 1 or r 2 depending upon the need to find distances from the centers of the nearer or farther ...
The distance between two objects that are not points is usually defined to be the smallest distance among pairs of points from the two objects. Formulas are known for computing distances between different types of objects, such as the distance from a point to a line.
This different definition of distance also leads to a different definition of the length of a curve, for which a line segment between any two points has the same length as a grid path between those points rather than its Euclidean length. The taxicab distance is also sometimes known as rectilinear distance or L 1 distance (see L p space). [1]