Distancë

Distancë is a term describing the separation between two points. In Albanian, distancë is the standard noun for distance, used across science, geography, and daily life. Distances can be measured in various units, from millimeters to light-years, depending on scale.

In mathematics and geometry, distance is a measure of how far two points are. A distance function or metric assigns a nonnegative real number to a pair of points. The Euclidean distance is the most familiar: sqrt((x2−x1)^2+(y2−y1)^2+(z2−z1)^2). Other metrics exist, such as Manhattan or Minkowski distance.

In geography, the shortest path between two points on a globe is a geodesic distance, often calculated as a great-circle distance using the haversine formula or more sophisticated methods on a given reference ellipsoid.

In physics, distance concepts extend to spacetime, where the invariant interval replaces ordinary distance. In special relativity, ds^2 = c^2 dt^2 − dx^2 − dy^2 − dz^2 describes the separation between events, invariant under coordinate changes.

Distancë also appears in everyday terms: travel planning, logistics, communications, and social or temporal distance, which measures separations in time or relationships rather than space. In computer science, distance functions underpin clustering and recommendation algorithms.