On this Distance valentines day ideas the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. This article needs additional citations for verification.

Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Distance is a numerical or occasionally qualitative measurement of how far apart objects or points are. In the social sciences, distance can refer to a qualitative measurement of separation, such as social distance or psychological distance. The distance between physical locations can be defined in different ways in different contexts. The distance between two points in physical space is the length of a straight line between them, which is the shortest possible path.

Straight-line distance is formalized mathematically as the Euclidean distance in two- and three-dimensional space. In coordinate geometry, Euclidean distance is computed using the Pythagorean theorem. This idea generalizes to higher-dimensional Euclidean spaces. There are many ways of measuring straight-line distances. The straight-line distance between two points on the surface of the Earth is not very useful for most purposes, since we cannot tunnel straight through the Earth’s mantle. Instead, one typically measures the shortest path along the surface of the Earth, as the crow flies. More generally, the shortest path between two points along a curved surface is known as a geodesic.