distance
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Distance is the measure of how far apart two things are from each other. It matters because knowing distances helps us navigate, plan travel, and understand the space between places and objects in our daily lives.
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Article
21 sectionsContents
- Distances in physics and geometry<!--This article violates WP:NOBACKREF all over the place, but I think it sounds better that way, and in some places genuinely requires it. Please think twice before changing it-->
- Straight-line or Euclidean distance
- Measurement
- Shortest-path distance on a curved surface
- Effects of relativity
- Other spatial distances
- Metaphorical distances
- Statistical distances
- Edit distances
- Distance in graph theory
- In the social sciences
- Mathematical formalization
- Distance between sets
- Related ideas
- Distance travelled{{anchor|Travelled|Traveled}}
- Displacement and directed distance{{anchor|Displacement|Directed distance}}
- Signed distance
- See also
- Library support
- References
- Bibliography
thumb|275px|A board showing distances near Visakhapatnam, India
Distance is a numerical or occasionally qualitative measurement of how far apart objects, points, people, or ideas are. In physics or everyday usage, distance may refer to a physical length or an estimation based on other criteria (e.g. "two counties over"). The term is also frequently used metaphorically to mean a measurement of the amount of difference between two similar objects (such as statistical distance between probability distributions or edit distance between strings of text) or a degree of separation (as exemplified by distance between people in a social network). Most such notions of distance, both physical and metaphorical, are formalized in mathematics using the notion of a metric space.