What is Taxicab Geometry?
Relatively unexamined by the general public, yet encountered by everyone every day, Taxicab Geometry a world beyond Euclidian Geometry that models the streets of an ideal city and has broad uses in real-life situations. While it maintains many fundamental concepts of the geometry everyone is accustomed to (think squares and circles), taxicab geometry differs in a few key areas. What is the difference? Taxicab geometry is a field of geometry that differs greatly from the Euclidean geometry that most of us are used to. In taxicab geometry the only way that you can move between two points is to move in a horizontal or vertical straight line or turn at a right angle. Think of a taxicab driver on a city grid. The driver can only follow the streets. He must either go straight or turn left or right (at a right angle.) This is how taxicab geometry got its name, and it differs from Euclidean geometry in that in Euclidean geometry you connect any two points with a straight line. An example of th
