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- d=\sqrt { { ({ x }_{ 2 }-{ x }_{ 1 }) }^{ 2 }+{ ({ y }_{ 2 }-{ y }_{ 1 }) }^{ 2 } }
- Application: Find the distance between two points on a coordinate plane
- The shareable video below provides a good explanation on the derivation of the distance formula using the Pythagorean Theorem and the distance between two points on a number line
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Distance is a numerical or occasionally qualitative measurement of how far apart objects or points 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"). Since spatial cognition is a rich source of conceptual metaphors in human thought, 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.
In the social sciences, distance can refer to a qualitative measurement of separation, such as social distance or psychological distance.