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.

Using the Pythagorean theorem to compute two-

dimensional Euclidean distance

These names come from the ancient Greek mathematicians Euclid and Pythagoras. In the Greek
deductive geometry exemplified by Euclid's Elements, distances were not represented as numbers
but line segments of the same length, which were considered "equal". The notion of distance is
inherent in the compass tool used to draw a circle, whose points all have the same distance from a
common center point. The connection from the Pythagorean theorem to distance calculation was
not made until the 18th century.

The distance between two objects that are not points is usually defined to be the smallest distance
among pairs of points from the two objects. Formulas are known for computing distances between
different types of objects, such as the distance from a point to a line. In advanced mathematics, the
concept of distance has been generalized to abstract metric spaces, and other distances than
Euclidean have been studied. In some applications in statistics and optimization, the square of the
Euclidean distance is used instead of the distance itself.

Distance formulas

One dimension

The distance between any two points on the real line is the absolute value of the numerical
difference of their coordinates, their absolute difference. Thus if and are two points on the real
line, then the distance between them is given by:[1]

A more complicated formula, giving the same value, but generalizing more readily to higher
dimensions, is:[1]

In this formula, squaring and then taking the square root leaves any positive number unchanged, but
replaces any negative number by its absolute value.[1]

Two dimensions

In the Euclidean plane, let point have Cartesian coordinates and let point have
coordinates . Then the distance between and is given by:[2]

This can be seen by applying the Pythagorean theorem to a right triangle with horizontal and vertical
sides, having the line segment from to as its hypotenuse. The two squared formulas inside the
square root give the areas of squares on the horizontal and vertical sides, and the outer square root
converts the area of the square on the hypotenuse into the length of the hypotenuse.[3]

It is also possible to compute the distance for points given by polar coordinates. If the polar
coordinates of are and the polar coordinates of are , then their distance is[2] given
by the law of cosines:

When and are expressed as complex numbers in the complex plane, the same formula for one-
dimensional points expressed as real numbers can be used, although here the absolute value sign
indicates the complex norm:[4]
Higher dimensions

Deriving the -dimensional Euclidean

distance formula by repeatedly applying the
Pythagorean theorem

In three dimensions, for points given by their Cartesian coordinates, the distance is

In general, for points given by Cartesian coordinates in -dimensional Euclidean space, the distance
is[5]

The Euclidean distance may also be expressed more compactly in terms of the Euclidean norm of
the Euclidean vector difference:

Objects other than points

For pairs of objects that are not both points, the distance can most simply be defined as the
smallest distance between any two points from the two objects, although more complicated
generalizations from points to sets such as Hausdorff distance are also commonly used.[6]
Formulas for computing distances between different types of objects include:

The distance from a point to a line, in the Euclidean plane[7]

The distance from a point to a plane in three-dimensional Euclidean space[7]

The distance between two lines in three-dimensional Euclidean space[8]

The distance from a point to a curve can be used to define its parallel curve, another curve all of
whose points have the same distance to the given curve.[9]

Properties

The Euclidean distance is the prototypical example of the distance in a metric space,[10] and obeys
all the defining properties of a metric space:[11]

It is symmetric, meaning that for all points and , . That is (unlike road
distance with one-way streets) the distance between two points does not depend on which of the
two points is the start and which is the destination.[11]

It is positive, meaning that the distance between every two distinct points is a positive number,
while the distance from any point to itself is zero.[11]

It obeys the triangle inequality: for every three points , , and , .

Intuitively, traveling from to via cannot be any shorter than traveling directly from to .[11]

Another property, Ptolemy's inequality, concerns the Euclidean distances among four points , , ,
and . It states that

For points in the plane, this can be rephrased as stating that for every quadrilateral, the products of
opposite sides of the quadrilateral sum to at least as large a number as the product of its diagonals.
However, Ptolemy's inequality applies more generally to points in Euclidean spaces of any
dimension, no matter how they are arranged.[12] For points in metric spaces that are not Euclidean
spaces, this inequality may not be true. Euclidean distance geometry studies properties of Euclidean
distance such as Ptolemy's inequality, and their application in testing whether given sets of
distances come from points in a Euclidean space.[13]

According to the Beckman–Quarles theorem, any transformation of the Euclidean plane or of a

higher-dimensional Euclidean space that preserves unit distances must be an isometry, preserving
all distances.[14]

Squared Euclidean distance

 A cone, the graph of Euclidean A paraboloid, the graph of squared
distance from the origin in the Euclidean distance from the origin
plane

In many applications, and in particular when comparing distances, it may be more convenient to
omit the final square root in the calculation of Euclidean distances, as the square root does not
change the order ( if and only if ). The value resulting from this omission is the
square of the Euclidean distance, and is called the squared Euclidean distance.[15] For instance, the
Euclidean minimum spanning tree can be determined using only the ordering between distances,
and not their numeric values. Comparing squared distances produces the same result but avoids an
unnecessary square-root calculation and sidesteps issues of numerical precision.[16] As an
equation, the squared distance can be expressed as a sum of squares:

Beyond its application to distance comparison, squared Euclidean distance is of central importance
in statistics, where it is used in the method of least squares, a standard method of fitting statistical
estimates to data by minimizing the average of the squared distances between observed and
estimated values,[17] and as the simplest form of divergence to compare probability distributions.[18]
The addition of squared distances to each other, as is done in least squares fitting, corresponds to
an operation on (unsquared) distances called Pythagorean addition.[19] In cluster analysis, squared
distances can be used to strengthen the effect of longer distances.[15]

Squared Euclidean distance does not form a metric space, as it does not satisfy the triangle
inequality.[20] However it is a smooth, strictly convex function of the two points, unlike the distance,
which is non-smooth (near pairs of equal points) and convex but not strictly convex. The squared
distance is thus preferred in optimization theory, since it allows convex analysis to be used. Since
squaring is a monotonic function of non-negative values, minimizing squared distance is equivalent
to minimizing the Euclidean distance, so the optimization problem is equivalent in terms of either,
but easier to solve using squared distance.[21]

The collection of all squared distances between pairs of points from a finite set may be stored in a
Euclidean distance matrix, and is used in this form in distance geometry.[22]
Generalizations

In more advanced areas of mathematics, when viewing Euclidean space as a vector space, its
distance is associated with a norm called the Euclidean norm, defined as the distance of each
vector from the origin. One of the important properties of this norm, relative to other norms, is that it
remains unchanged under arbitrary rotations of space around the origin.[23] By Dvoretzky's theorem,
every finite-dimensional normed vector space has a high-dimensional subspace on which the norm
is approximately Euclidean; the Euclidean norm is the only norm with this property.[24] It can be
extended to infinite-dimensional vector spaces as the L2 norm or L2 distance.[25] The Euclidean
distance gives Euclidean space the structure of a topological space, the Euclidean topology, with the
open balls (subsets of points at less than a given distance from a given point) as its
neighborhoods.[26]

Comparison of Chebyshev, Euclidean

and taxicab distances for the
hypotenuse of a 3-4-5 triangle on a
chessboard

Other common distances in real coordinate spaces and function spaces:[27]

Chebyshev distance (L∞ distance), which measures distance as the maximum of the distances in
each coordinate.

Taxicab distance (L1 distance), also called Manhattan distance, which measures distance as the
sum of the distances in each coordinate.

Minkowski distance (Lp distance), a generalization that unifies Euclidean distance, taxicab
distance, and Chebyshev distance.

For points on surfaces in three dimensions, the Euclidean distance should be distinguished from the
geodesic distance, the length of a shortest curve that belongs to the surface. In particular, for
measuring great-circle distances on the Earth or other spherical or near-spherical surfaces,
distances that have been used include the haversine distance giving great-circle distances between
two points on a sphere from their longitudes and latitudes, and Vincenty's formulae also known as
"Vincent distance" for distance on a spheroid.[28]

History

Euclidean distance is the distance in Euclidean space. Both concepts are named after ancient Greek
mathematician Euclid, whose Elements became a standard textbook in geometry for many
centuries.[29] Concepts of length and distance are widespread across cultures, can be dated to the
earliest surviving "protoliterate" bureaucratic documents from Sumer in the fourth millennium BC
(far before Euclid),[30] and have been hypothesized to develop in children earlier than the related
concepts of speed and time.[31] But the notion of a distance, as a number defined from two points,
does not actually appear in Euclid's Elements. Instead, Euclid approaches this concept implicitly,
through the congruence of line segments, through the comparison of lengths of line segments, and
through the concept of proportionality.[32]

The Pythagorean theorem is also ancient, but it could only take its central role in the measurement
of distances after the invention of Cartesian coordinates by René Descartes in 1637. The distance
formula itself was first published in 1731 by Alexis Clairaut.[33] Because of this formula, Euclidean
distance is also sometimes called Pythagorean distance.[34] Although accurate measurements of
long distances on the Earth's surface, which are not Euclidean, had again been studied in many
cultures since ancient times (see history of geodesy), the idea that Euclidean distance might not be
the only way of measuring distances between points in mathematical spaces came even later, with
the 19th-century formulation of non-Euclidean geometry.[35] The definition of the Euclidean norm
and Euclidean distance for geometries of more than three dimensions also first appeared in the
19th century, in the work of Augustin-Louis Cauchy.[36]

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