Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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 between the two points on the surface of the sphere. (By comparison, the shortest path passing through the sphere's interior is the chord between ...
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.
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 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 ...
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).