What is latitude and longitude based on?

Answer 1

Latitude is based on the equator. Longitude i sbased on Greenwich, England. The English came up with the idea, so they got to choose to reference point.

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This system of locating points on the Earth's surface that we're discussing is a direct

application of "spherical coordinates", familiar to anyone who has gone past high-school-

junior-year math.

In the mathematics of spherical coordinates, the position of a point is specified by

three numbers: the radial distance of that point from a fixed origin, its polar angle

measured from a fixed zenith direction, and the azimuth angle of its orthogonal

projection on a reference plane that passes through the origin and is orthogonal

to the zenith, measured from a fixed reference direction on that plane.

We take that system of coordinates, place its origin at the Earth's center, set the

fixed zenith direction to be the direction from the origin toward the Earth's north pole,

use the Earth's radius for the radial distance of all points so that we never have to

specify it, and locate any point using the two angles of its spherical coordinates.