Sometimes when I’m in a tall building or a plane, I wonder how far away the horizon is. Well, at least I do during days of better air quality and clearer skies… Or if there’s some mountain or something in the distance I’ll wonder how far away from it you can go and still see it before the curvature of the Earth hides it below the horizon. It might seem like a tough problem to solve since spherical geometry is a notoriously difficult aspect of university mathematics, and we’re talking about distances relative to a curving Earth. It turns out, though, that it’s really not so bad! The only math you need is middle/high school geometry.
when i was in paris with my parents in 8th grade, i was taking geometry, and one of my fondest memories was doing some napkin-math at a little cafe with my dad one evening to determine the distance we were from the Eiffel Tower based on the few numbers we did know about it... this reminds me of that
when i was in paris with my parents in 8th grade, i was taking geometry, and one of my fondest memories was doing some napkin-math at a little cafe with my dad one evening to determine the distance we were from the Eiffel Tower based on the few numbers we did know about it... this reminds me of that