Re: Signed Distance -- What?
Hi,
It depends on whether you are dealing with scalers or vectors. When you drive your car, the speed given on your speedometer is a scaler: it is always positive and gives no indication of direction, futhermore, it is never negative. On the other hand if you are standing, then take 2 steps forward, then 3 steps backward, you have travelled a net distance of -1 steps. The "-" indicates the direction you have travelled.
HTH
kevin
Re: Signed Distance -- What?
Distance is always positive, to quote mathworld:
While officially there is no such thing as a negative distance you can of course use something like distance that also stores a component of the direction, givining you a 'signed distance'.