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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 derived and expressed in several ways.
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 ...
The comoving distance from an observer to a distant object (e.g. galaxy) can be computed by the following formula (derived using the Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker metric): = ′ (′) where a(t′) is the scale factor, t e is the time of emission of the photons detected by the observer, t is the present time, and c is the speed of ...
Geographical distance or geodetic distance is the distance measured along the surface of the Earth, or the shortest arch length. The formulae in this article calculate distances between points which are defined by geographical coordinates in terms of latitude and longitude. This distance is an element in solving the second (inverse) geodetic ...
The distance between two points in physical space is the length of a straight line between them, which is the shortest possible path. This is the usual meaning of distance in classical physics, including Newtonian mechanics. Straight-line distance is formalized mathematically as the Euclidean distance in two- and three-dimensional space.
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 ...
Δ λ = λ 2 − λ 1 {\displaystyle \Delta \lambda =\lambda _ {2}-\lambda _ {1}} . Finally, the haversine function hav (θ), applied above to both the central angle θ and the differences in latitude and longitude, is. The haversine function computes half a versine of the angle θ, or the squares of half chord of the angle on a unit circle ...
Vincenty's formulae. Vincenty's formulae are two related iterative methods used in geodesy to calculate the distance between two points on the surface of a spheroid, developed by Thaddeus Vincenty (1975a). They are based on the assumption that the figure of the Earth is an oblate spheroid, and hence are more accurate than methods that assume a ...