noun
- Plural of haversine; a mathematical function used in navigation and spherical trigonometry to calculate distances between two points on a sphere given their latitudes and longitudes.
Usage: technical; mathematics; navigation
Examples
- The haversines formula is commonly used in GPS and mapping applications to compute great-circle distances.
- Navigators rely on haversines to determine the shortest path between two geographic coordinates.
- The haversines function simplifies spherical distance calculations by avoiding some computational pitfalls of other methods.
- Modern flight-planning software uses haversines to calculate distances between airports on Earth.