Taxicab Geometry - Formal Description

Formal Description

The taxicab distance, between two vectors in an n-dimensional real vector space with fixed Cartesian coordinate system, is the sum of the lengths of the projections of the line segment between the points onto the coordinate axes. More formally,

where

are vectors.

For example, in the plane, the taxicab distance between and is

Taxicab distance depends on the rotation of the coordinate system, but does not depend on its reflection about a coordinate axis or its translation. Taxicab geometry satisfies all of Hilbert's axioms (a formalization of Euclidean geometry) except for the side-angle-side axiom, as one can generate two triangles each with two sides and the angle between them the same, and have them not be congruent.

A circle is a set of points with a fixed distance, called the radius, from a point called the center. In taxicab geometry, distance is determined by a different metric than in Euclidean geometry, and the shape of circles changes as well. Taxicab circles are squares with sides oriented at a 45° angle to the coordinate axes. The image to the right shows why this is true, by showing in red the set of all points with a fixed distance from a center, shown in blue. As the size of the city blocks diminishes, the points become more numerous and become a rotated square in a continuous taxicab geometry. While each side would have length √2r using a Euclidean metric, where r is the circle's radius, its length in taxicab geometry is 2r. Thus, a circle's circumference is 8r. Thus, the value of a geometric analog to is 4 in this geometry. The formula for the unit circle in taxicab geometry is in Cartesian coordinates and

in polar coordinates.

A circle of radius r for the Chebyshev distance (L_∞ metric) on a plane is also a square with side length 2r parallel to the coordinate axes, so planar Chebyshev distance can be viewed as equivalent by rotation and scaling to planar taxicab distance. However, this equivalence between L₁ and L_∞ metrics does not generalize to higher dimensions.

The use of Manhattan distance leads to a strange concept: when the resolution of the Taxicab geometry is made larger, approaching infinity (the size of division of the axis approaches 0), it seems intuitive that the Manhattan distance would approach the Euclidean metric

but it does not. This is essentially a consequence of being forced to adhere to single-axis movement: when following the Manhattan metric, one cannot move diagonally (in more than one axis simultaneously).

Whenever each pair in a collection of these circles has a nonempty intersection, there exists an intersection point for the whole collection; therefore, the Manhattan distance forms an injective metric space.

A circle of radius 1 (using this distance) is the von Neumann neighborhood of its center.