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Spherical Earth or Earth's curvature refers to the approximation of the figure of the Earth as a sphere . The earliest documented mention of the concept dates from around the 5th century BC, when it appears in the writings of Greek philosophers. [ 1][ 2] In the 3rd century BC, Hellenistic astronomy established the roughly spherical shape of ...
v. t. e. Geodesy or geodetics[ 1] is the science of measuring and representing the geometry, gravity, and spatial orientation of the Earth in temporally varying 3D. It is called planetary geodesy when studying other astronomical bodies, such as planets or circumplanetary systems. [ 2]
t. e. In geodesy, the figure of the Earth is the size and shape used to model planet Earth. The kind of figure depends on application, including the precision needed for the model. A spherical Earth is a well-known historical approximation that is satisfactory for geography, astronomy and many other purposes.
A globe is the only representation of the Earth that does not distort either the shape or the size of large features – land masses, bodies of water, etc. The Earth's circumference is quite close to 40 million metres. [1] [2] Many globes are made with a circumference of one metre, so they are models of the Earth at a scale of 1:40 million.
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions is a satirical novella by the English schoolmaster Edwin Abbott Abbott, first published in 1884 by Seeley & Co. of London. Written pseudonymously by "A Square", [1] the book used the fictional two-dimensional world of Flatland to comment on the hierarchy of Victorian culture, but the novella's more enduring contribution is its examination of dimensions.
The geographical centre of Earth is the geometric centre of all land surfaces on Earth. Geometrically defined it is the centroid of all land surfaces within the two dimensions of the Geoid surface which approximates the Earth's outer shape. The term centre of minimum distance [1] specifies the concept more precisely as the domain is the sphere ...
Another type of sphere arises from a 4-ball, whose three-dimensional surface is the 3-sphere: points equidistant to the origin of the euclidean space R 4. If a point has coordinates, P ( x , y , z , w ) , then x 2 + y 2 + z 2 + w 2 = 1 characterizes those points on the unit 3-sphere centered at the origin.
World map. A world map is a map of most or all of the surface of Earth. World maps, because of their scale, must deal with the problem of projection. Maps rendered in two dimensions by necessity distort the display of the three-dimensional surface of the Earth. While this is true of any map, these distortions reach extremes in a world map.