Chapter 7, Problem 31P

The shortest distance between two points on the surface of the globe (great circle distance) can be calculated by using the haversine formula. If F₁. and ?₁ are the latitude and longitude of point 1 and F₂and ?₂ are the latitude and longitude of point 2, the great circle distance between the points is given by: $d=2R{\sin }^{-1}\left(\sqrt{a}\right)$ where $a=\sin \frac{{\Phi }_2-{\Phi }_1}{2}+\cos {\Phi }_1\cos {\Phi }_2\cos {\Phi }_1{\sin }^2\left(\frac{{\lambda }_2-{\lambda }_1}{2}\right)$ , and R =3,959 mi is the Earth radius. Write a user-defined function that determines the distance between two points on the Earth. For the function name and arguments, use dis=GreatCirDis(Lat1, Lng1, Lat2, Lng2), where the input arguments are the latitude and longitude of the two points (degrees in decimal format), and dis is the great-circle distance in miles. Use the function to calculate the distance between London (51.50853°, 0.12574°) and New York City (40.71427°, -74.00597°).