Coordonatele polare și sferice

Abstract

The paper focuses on the polar and spherical coordinate systems. The first part is a synthesis presenting a short history of the polar coordinates and several applications of these: graphs in polar coordinates, surface area of shapes, arc length of a line, etc. It also introduces the cylindrical coordinates system. The second part, which focuses on the spherical coordinates, shows how to build an algorithm that finds the shortest distance between two points on a sphere. As an example, the distance between Chisinau and several other cities is calculated based on their spherical coordinates only.