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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.
Angular distance or angular separation is the measure of the angle between the orientation of two straight lines, rays, or vectors in three-dimensional space, or the central angle subtended by the radii through two points on a sphere.
atan2(y, x) returns the angle θ between the positive x-axis and the ray from the origin to the point (x, y), confined to (−π, π].Graph of (,) over /. In computing and mathematics, the function atan2 is the 2-argument arctangent.
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 ...
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
A tunnel between points on Earth is defined by a Cartesian line through three-dimensional space between the points of interest. The tunnel distance D t = 2 R sin D 2 R {\displaystyle D_{\textrm {t}}=2R\sin {\frac {D}{2R}}} is the great-circle chord length and may be calculated as follows for the corresponding unit sphere:
In China, Pei Xiu (224–271) identified "measuring right angles and acute angles" as the fifth of his six principles for accurate map-making, necessary to accurately establish distances, [5] while Liu Hui (c. 263) gives a version of the calculation above, for measuring perpendicular distances to inaccessible places.
In trigonometry, the Snellius–Pothenot problem is a problem first described in the context of planar surveying.Given three known points A, B, C, an observer at an unknown point P observes that the line segment AC subtends an angle α and the segment CB subtends an angle β; the problem is to determine the position of the point P.