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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 ...
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 ...
If the sphere is isometrically embedded in Euclidean space, the sphere's intersection with a plane is a circle, which can be interpreted extrinsically to the sphere as a Euclidean circle: a locus of points in the plane at a constant Euclidean distance (the extrinsic radius) from a point in the plane (the extrinsic center). A great circle lies ...
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
The spherical coordinate system is commonly used in physics. It assigns three numbers (known as coordinates) to every point in Euclidean space: radial distance r, polar angle θ , and azimuthal angle φ . The symbol ρ is often used instead of r.
defining the distance between two points P = (p x, p y) and Q = (q x, q y) is then known as the Euclidean metric, and other metrics define non-Euclidean geometries. In terms of analytic geometry, the restriction of classical geometry to compass and straightedge constructions means a restriction to first- and second-order equations, e.g., y = 2 ...
Many theorems from classical geometry hold true for spherical geometry as well, but not all do because the sphere fails to satisfy some of classical geometry's postulates, including the parallel postulate. In spherical trigonometry, angles are defined between great circles. Spherical trigonometry differs from ordinary trigonometry in
As such, the -sphere is the setting for -dimensional spherical geometry. Considered extrinsically, as a hypersurface embedded in (+) -dimensional Euclidean space, an -sphere is the locus of points at equal distance (the radius) from a given center point.