Euclidean distance in the context of "Directed line segment"

In mathematics, a Euclidean plane is a Euclidean space of dimension two, denoted ${\displaystyle {\textbf {E}}^{2}}$ or ${\displaystyle \mathbb {E} ^{2}}$. It is a geometric space in which two real numbers are required to determine the position of each point. It is an affine space, which includes in particular the concept of parallel lines. It has also metrical properties induced by a distance, which allows to define circles, and angle measurement.

A Euclidean plane with a chosen Cartesian coordinate system is called a Cartesian plane.The set ${\displaystyle \mathbb {R} ^{2}}$ of the ordered pairs of real numbers (the real coordinate plane), equipped with the dot product, is often called the Euclidean plane or standard Euclidean plane, since every Euclidean plane is isomorphic to it.

Surveying or land surveying is the technique, profession, art, and science of determining the terrestrial positions of points based on the distances and angles between them. These points are usually on the surface of the Earth, and they are often used to establish maps and boundaries for ownership, locations, such as the designated positions of structural components for construction or the surface location of subsurface features, or other purposes required by government or civil law, such as property sales.

A professional in land surveying is called a land surveyor.Surveyors work with elements of geodesy, geometry, trigonometry, regression analysis, physics, engineering, metrology, programming languages, and the law. They use equipment, such as total stations, robotic total stations, theodolites, GNSS receivers, retroreflectors, 3D scanners, lidar sensors, radios, inclinometer, handheld tablets, optical and digital levels, subsurface locators, drones, GIS, and surveying software.

In geometry, a point reflection (also called a point inversion or central inversion) is a geometric transformation of affine space in which every point is reflected across a designated inversion center, which remains fixed. In Euclidean or pseudo-Euclidean spaces, a point reflection is an isometry (preserves distance). In the Euclidean plane, a point reflection is the same as a half-turn rotation (180° or π radians), while in three-dimensional Euclidean space a point reflection is an improper rotation which preserves distances but reverses orientation. A point reflection is an involution: applying it twice is the identity transformation.

An object that is invariant under a point reflection is said to possess point symmetry (also called inversion symmetry or central symmetry). A point group including a point reflection among its symmetries is called centrosymmetric. Inversion symmetry is found in many crystal structures and molecules, and has a major effect upon their physical properties.

In Euclidean geometry, an affine transformation or affinity (from the Latin, affinis, "connected with") is a geometric transformation that preserves lines and parallelism, but not necessarily Euclidean distances and angles.

More generally, an affine transformation is an automorphism of an affine space (Euclidean spaces are specific affine spaces), that is, a function which maps an affine space onto itself while preserving both the dimension of any affine subspaces (meaning that it sends points to points, lines to lines, planes to planes, and so on) and the ratios of the lengths of parallel line segments. Consequently, sets of parallel affine subspaces remain parallel after an affine transformation. An affine transformation does not necessarily preserve angles between lines or distances between points, though it does preserve ratios of distances between points lying on a straight line.

Sinuosity, sinuosity index, or sinuosity coefficient of a continuously differentiable curve having at least one inflection point is the ratio of the curvilinear length (along the curve) and the Euclidean distance (straight line) between the end points of the curve. This dimensionless quantity can also be rephrased as the "actual path length" divided by the "shortest path length" of a curve.The value ranges from 1 (case of straight line) to infinity (case of a closed loop, where the shortest path length is zero for an infinitely-long actual path).

In geometry, a flat is an affine subspace, i.e. a subset of an affine space that is itself an affine space. Particularly, in the case the parent space is Euclidean, a flat is a Euclidean subspace which inherits the notion of distance from its parent space.

In an n-dimensional space, there are k-flats of every dimension k from 0 to n; flats one dimension lower than the parent space, (n − 1)-flats, are called hyperplanes.

In geometry, a motion is an isometry of a metric space. For instance, a plane equipped with the Euclidean distance metric is a metric space in which a mapping associating congruent figures is a motion.

Motions can be divided into direct (also known as proper or rigid) and indirect (or improper) motions.Direct motions include translations and rotations, which preserve the orientation of a chiral shape.Indirect motions include reflections, glide reflections, and Improper rotations, that invert the orientation of a chiral shape.Some geometers define motion in such a way that only direct motions are motions.

Distance measures are used in physical cosmology to generalize the concept of distance between two objects or events in an expanding universe. They may be used to tie some observable quantity (such as the luminosity of a distant quasar, the redshift of a distant galaxy, or the angular size of the acoustic peaks in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) power spectrum) to another quantity that is not directly observable, but is more convenient for calculations (such as the comoving coordinates of the quasar, galaxy, etc.). The distance measures discussed here all reduce to the common notion of Euclidean distance at low redshift.

In accord with our present understanding of cosmology, these measures are calculated within the context of general relativity, where the Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker solution is used to describe the universe.