Invisible wrote:
>
> So how *do* you compute the distance between two points in a non-Euclid
> space anyway?
Generally you start with a notion of something like a dot product
defined in the tangent spaces of your space and then write out an
integral to define the arc length of a curve. Then the distance between
two points can be defined to be the minimum length of any curve
connecting them.
> For that matter, is there a way to unambiguously refer to a specific
> point in such a space?
Depends on the space. A relatively general but computationally
cumbersome solution is to cover your space will small Cartesian patches
which connect together in a "nice" way. The you can define a point by
giving its Cartesian patch and its coordinates within that patch.
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