Euclidean distance matrix

When we think about a distance between two things, like how far apart two cities are, we usually measure it in miles or kilometers. But when we have a lot of things, like a bunch of cities, we need to measure the distance between all of them. That's called a distance matrix, which is like a big table that tells us how far apart every city is from every other city.

Euclidean distance matrix is a fancy way of saying we're measuring the distance in a straight line, like if we drew a line from one city to another on a map. It's like playing connect-the-dots, but we're connecting all the cities and measuring the distance between them.

So, imagine we have a bunch of dots on a piece of paper, and we want to measure how far apart they are using a ruler. We can measure the distance from one dot to another dot in a straight line, which is the Euclidean distance. Then we can put all those distances in a table, or matrix, that shows us how far apart every dot is from every other dot.

That's what a Euclidean distance matrix is! It's a big table that tells us the straight-line distance between lots of things, like cities or dots.