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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 ...
Great-circle navigation. 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.
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.
The two-second rule is useful as it can be applied to any speed. Drivers can find it difficult to estimate the correct distance from the car in front, let alone remember the stopping distances that are required for a given speed, or to compute the equation on the fly (for example, braking distance is roughly calculated as b = s 2 /20, where b is the braking distance in metres and s is car ...
Distance from a point to a line. The distance (or perpendicular distance) from a point to a line is the shortest distance from a fixed point to any point on a fixed infinite line in Euclidean geometry. It is the length of the line segment which joins the point to the line and is perpendicular to the line. The formula for calculating it can be ...
Euclidean distance. In mathematics, the Euclidean distance between two points in Euclidean space is the length of the line segment between them. It can be calculated from the Cartesian coordinates of the points using the Pythagorean theorem, and therefore is occasionally called the Pythagorean distance . These names come from the ancient Greek ...
Greatest distance between any two points in the 50 states: 5,859 miles (9,429 km), from Kure Atoll, Hawaii, to Log Point, Elliott Key, Florida. [23] Greatest distance between any two points in the contiguous 48 states: 2,901 miles (4,669 km), from North Farallon Island, California, to Sail Rock, east of West Quoddy Head, Maine. [23]
Formal definition. The taxicab distance, , between two points in an n -dimensional real coordinate space with fixed Cartesian coordinate system, is the sum of the lengths of the projections of the line segment between the points onto the coordinate axes. More formally, For example, in , the taxicab distance between and is.