Tovarich EmmyNoether on Nostr: It's a "great circle", i.e. the shortest line between two points on the surface of a ...
It's a "great circle", i.e. the shortest line between two points on the surface of a sphere.
(Strictly speaking - sad nerd alert - geodesics are lines that parallel transport their own tangent vector once you've imposed an affine connection on a space. That's what a mathematician means by "straight." But once you have a metric on the space as well, that becomes "shortest line.")
(Strictly speaking - sad nerd alert - geodesics are lines that parallel transport their own tangent vector once you've imposed an affine connection on a space. That's what a mathematician means by "straight." But once you have a metric on the space as well, that becomes "shortest line.")