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The study of geodesics on an ellipsoid arose in connection with geodesy specifically with the solution of triangulation networks. The figure of the Earth is well approximated by an oblate ellipsoid, a slightly flattened sphere. A geodesic is the shortest path between two points on a curved surface, analogous to a straight line on a plane surface.
Klein quartic with 28 geodesics (marked by 7 colors and 4 patterns). In geometry, a geodesic (/ ˌ dʒ iː. ə ˈ d ɛ s ɪ k,-oʊ-,-ˈ d iː s ɪ k,-z ɪ k /) [1] [2] is a curve representing in some sense the shortest [a] path between two points in a surface, or more generally in a Riemannian manifold.
Ellipsoid. An ellipsoid is a surface that can be obtained from a sphere by deforming it by means of directional scalings, or more generally, of an affine transformation. An ellipsoid is a quadric surface; that is, a surface that may be defined as the zero set of a polynomial of degree two in three variables.
Vincenty's goal was to express existing algorithms for geodesics on an ellipsoid in a form that minimized the program length (Vincenty 1975a). His unpublished report (1975b) mentions the use of a Wang 720 desk calculator, which had only a few kilobytes of memory. To obtain good accuracy for long lines, the solution uses the classical solution ...
Earth section paths are plane curves defined by the intersection of an earth ellipsoid and a plane (ellipsoid plane sections). Common examples include the great ellipse (containing the center of the ellipsoid) and normal sections (containing an ellipsoid normal direction). Earth section paths are useful as approximate solutions for geodetic ...
Geodetic coordinates are a type of curvilinear orthogonal coordinate system used in geodesy based on a reference ellipsoid. They include geodetic latitude (north/south) ϕ, longitude (east/west) λ, and ellipsoidal height h (also known as geodetic height[1]). The triad is also known as Earth ellipsoidal coordinates[2] (not to be confused with ...
A triaxial ellipsoid and its three geodesics. A geodesic, on a Riemannian surface, is a curve that is locally straight at each of its points. On the Euclidean plane the geodesics are lines, and on a sphere the geodesics are great circles. The shortest path in the surface between two points is always a geodesic, but other geodesics may exist as ...
On the ellipsoid of revolution, geodesics are expressible in terms of elliptic integrals, which are usually evaluated in terms of a series expansion — see, for example, Vincenty's formulae. Observational concepts