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In plain geometry, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, or, more precisely, the line segment connecting point A to point B.

There are other possibilities when we move off a two-dimensional plane. On a sphere, like the surface of the earth, a "great circle" path is the shortest distance. (A great circle is a circle that runs along the surface of that sphere so as to cut it into two equal halves) Any route from A to B is going to be the arc drawn from A to B with the center of the earth as the point of reference (the place to put the point of the compass). This is an example of non-Euclidean geometry and there are many others.

It can get even more complicated. For example, there is elliptic and a hyperbolic geometry each with its own different replacement for the straight line in plain geometry.
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