Thursday, January 21, 2016

[zrpuinmn] Ellipsoids

Questions about spheres (and circles) remain elegant questions when asked about ellipsoids, but their answers seem much harder.

Inspired by geodesy: the shortest path between two points on a sphere is a great circle.  Computing the analogous shortest path on an ellipsoid is much trickier.

Ellipsoids of revolution are a useful special case, since they approximate the shape of the earth.

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