the.com/coordinate
A single number means nothing until it admits where it's standing.
means To coordinate is to bring different parts, people, or actions into a smooth working order — or, as a noun, one of the numbers that pins down a point's exact position in space.
from From Latin 'co-' (together) plus 'ordinare' (to arrange in order), itself from 'ordo,' a row or rank — the same root behind 'order' and 'ordinary.' It entered English first as a philosopher's word meaning 'of equal rank,' things set side by side rather than one above another. Mathematics later borrowed it for those paired numbers that locate a point, and everyday speech took the verb for the act of arranging things together — all of them keeping that old sense of putting parts into their proper places, as equals in a shared order.
- latin roots
- From co-ordinare, to arrange together as equals
- descartes
- Inspired allegedly by a fly crawling his ceiling
- gps precision
- Five decimal places pinpoints you within a meter
- longitude prize
- Britain paid millions to fix the missing coordinate
- zero point
- Null Island floats where two zeros meet
utm coordinate system — global mapping standard dividing earth into 60 zones, adopted by military and gis professionals since 1947
gps coordinates — latitude-longitude positions used by 5 billion+ devices worldwide to pinpoint locations within meters
cartesian coordinates — x-y-z axis system invented by descartes in 1637, foundation of analytic geometry and 3d graphics