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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.
There is a natural unit of angle measurement (based on a revolution), a natural unit of length (based on the circumference of a great circle) and a natural unit of area (based on the area of the sphere). Each great circle is associated with a pair of antipodal points, called its poles which are the common intersections of the set of great ...
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 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 ...
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 ...
In geometry, many uniform tilings on sphere, euclidean plane, and hyperbolic plane can be made by Wythoff construction within a fundamental triangle, (p q r), defined by internal angles as π/p, π/q, and π/r. Special cases are right triangles (p q 2).
Angular distance or angular separation is the measure of the angle between the orientation of two straight lines, rays, or vectors in three-dimensional space, or the central angle subtended by the radii through two points on a sphere.
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 ...