Distance formula, Algebraic expression that gives the distances between pairs of points in terms of their coordinates (see coordinate system).
The shortest distance between any two points is the length of the straight line joining the points. We can use this to measure the distance between two points. What if we want to find the distance between two cities that are in two different countries? It is not easy to measure the distance by drawing a straight line!
Here is another way to do this –
A pair of numbers can denote any point on the coordinate axes, called the coordinates of that point. Similarly, every place in this world is represented by latitude and longitude, which give us the coordinates of that place. We can make use of these coordinates to compute the distance between the cities using the distance formula.