Secant line point a "tangent line" and in no points an "exterior line". A "chord" of a circle is the line segment that joins two distinct points of the circle. A chord is therefore contained in a unique secant line and each secant line determines a unique chord. In rigorous modern treatments of plane geometry, results that seem obvious and were assumed (without statement) by Euclid in his treatment, are usually proved. For instance, "Theorem (Elementary Circular Continuity)": If formula_1 is a circle and formula_2 a line that contains a point that is inside formula_1 and a point that is outside of
Great-circle distance apply to a limited area). Using the mean earth radius, formula_21 (for the WGS84 ellipsoid) means that in the limit of small flattening, the mean square relative error in the estimates for distance is minimized. Great-circle distance The great-circle distance or orthodromic distance is the shortest distance between two points on the surface of a sphere, measured along the surface of the sphere (as opposed to a straight line through the sphere's interior). The distance between two points in Euclidean space is the length of a straight line between them, but on the sphere there are no straight lines. In