Why the order of the coordinates does not matter when calculating length

Question

asked Dec 21, 2015 20.3k views

1 Answer

Seon · Answer 1 · 2015-12-25T19:37:14+0000

The formula for calculating length is:

$\sqrt{ (x_b-x_a)^(2) + (y_b-y_a)^(2) }$

We can also write
x_a - x_b

or

Why it does not matter?
Let's assume we have 2 numbers, a and b.
When we perform a subtraction:

a-b

, we get another number

When we perform another subtraction:

b-a

, we get a number

When we raise

or

to the power of 2, the result is the same,
c^(2)

.