Distance

Distance is a numerical description of how far apart objects 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"). In most cases, "distance from A to B" is interchangeable with "distance from B to A". In mathematics, a distance function or metric is a generalization of the concept of physical distance. A metric is a function that behaves according to a specific set of rules, and is a way of describing what it means for elements of some space to be "close to" or "far away from" each other.

A physical distance can mean several different things:

"Circular distance" is the distance traveled by a wheel, which can be useful when designing vehicles or mechanical gears. The circumference of the wheel is 2π × radius, and assuming the radius to be 1, then each revolution of the wheel is equivalent of the distance 2π radians. In engineering ω = 2πƒ is often used, where ƒ is the frequency.

Unusual definitions of distance can be helpful to model certain physical situations, but are also used in theoretical mathematics:

Distance measures in cosmology are complicated by the expansion of the universe, and by effects described by the theory of relativity such as length contraction of moving objects.

The term "distance" is also used by analogy to measure non-physical entities in certain ways.

In computer science, there is the notion of the "edit distance" between two strings. For example, the words "dog" and "dot", which vary by only one letter, are closer than "dog" and "cat", which differ by three letters. This idea is used in spell checkers and in coding theory, and is mathematically formalized in several different ways, such as:

In mathematics, a metric space is a set for which distances between all members of the set are defined. In this way, many different types of "distances" can be calculated, such as for traversal of graphs, comparison of distributions and curves, and using unusual definitions of "space" (for example using a manifold or reflections). The notion of distance in graph theory has been used to describe social networks, for example with the Erdős number or the Bacon number, the number of collaborative relationships away a person is from prolific mathematician Paul Erdős or actor Kevin Bacon, respectively.

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