My friends and I live all over the place and we want to meet on the exact middle point of our addresses. Is there away in google maps or something else to do this?
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There is a website that calculates the halfway point between two addresses. The advantage of this over math is that it includes driving speed as part of the calculation. I live an hour from a highway while my friends in major cities do not. This is also nice because I assume you want to meet somewhere other than a random piece of farmland. It lets you search for hotels, restaurants, attractions, etc.
Since this doesn’t cover three locations, though, you’d have to do some fiddling. I might use this to calculate the three halfway points between you and each of your friends, then use the maths to narrow it down from there.
No there’s no way for google maps to automatically do it.
Get the coordinates of each point. Add the latitudes of each, divide by 3. Add the longitudes of each, divide by 3. The result is the lat and long of the mid point, enter it in google maps.
I'm not sure the average of the longitudes will result in the center in all cases. As a test case, if two points are just on either side of the 180° longitude, their average would be near 0° longitude... basically the opposite side of the Earth from where the center should be.
It might work to shift all the points so that one point is at 0°, 0° before taking the average and then shifting the average back by the same amount. During the shift you would need to unwrap the longitude angles to be in between -180° and 180°. I'd have to check that this works though.
Right I thought about this and assumed that when they said addresses and friends he meant they lived in the same octant of the globe.
It's a fair assumption in your case. Just identifying an edge case for prosperity.
Also, as others have pointed out, which "center" you want matters a lot.
If you want everyone to travel the same distance (sounds fair), then you want the circumcenter. However, this may mean that everyone travels very far so that the travel distance is the same. This happens the closer you and your friends are to living in a line.
Perhaps, you want to minimize the total distance traveled. I think this corresponds to the centroid of the triangle. It's not fair per se but the point will always be between you guys.
I think the simple process of averaging the coordinates will work. Otherwise centroid can be found at the intersection of the 3 lines formed when by each of the 3 points and the average of the other two. 99% sure it's the same place though.
It was a valuable mind experiment for me , thanks for sharing your thought process.
I divided the latitudes and longitudes like was proposed. We found a great location. However what you are pointing out makes some sense. Because I live close to 1 friend (50 KM apart) and the third friend lives 200KM apart from us.
The midpoint I calculated with the latitudes and the longitudes is roughly in the middle. But the ultimate goal was to meet up at a point exactly in the middle of three points. So we'd all have to travel the same distance if we could fly like birds. I am not sure but with the dividing coordinates method It seems like the friend that lives most far away has to travel a lot more than we do.
I guess the next question would be how do you find the point in a triangle that is the same distance from every corner.
https://a.placebetween.us/
There might be an app or something to do it, but you could do it with some maths! Take the average of the coordinates for your locations. Add up the the 3 latitudes and divide by three, then add up the three longitudes and divide by 3. Then type those into Google maps. (It'll be easier to add and divide them by using the coordinates in decimal degrees form, both given on Google maps if you click on a spot on the map)
Or you could measure the length of each side of the triangle made up by your locations, and find the length of each side, then find the halfway point of each side. Then draw a line from each halfway point/midpoint to the vertex/interior angle directly opposite that point. Where the three lines you've drawn intersect is the middle, or the centroid of the triangle.
Depend on which definition of center you want to use for a triangle. triangle centers
You might be able to do it in excel using solver. Put in the distance to each point from an arbitrary fourth point in a formula in each cell and then have solver minimize the sum of the distances by changing the fourth point.
Using a voronoi diagram, the intersecting point of the three partitions would be what you're looking for (This only takes into account Euclidean distance, though)
This would be a fairly easy way in a GIS, but of course that doesn't strictly answer your question.
The technical answer is that your answer will vary slightly on which ellipsoid are you using to approximate the shape of the earth.
Drawing a "straight" line on a map is extremely problematical. There are in common use at least a dozen different algorithms for producing a flat, planar diagram which represents a curved surface, a portion of the earth. Some of the methods attempt to portray equidistance among points shown, while others attempt to show equal sizes (areas). You can't do both. Wars have been fought when some high muckty muck draws a line on a chart and calls it an international boundary, however, on one projection it may appear to be a straight line but on another it may appear to be curved, and a town, say, or a river or a gold mine might be on one side of the line in one projection but on the other side of the line in a different projection. You could spend a lifetime studying this problem and not help humanity one iota get any closer to any better way of doing things.
Turf.js could do this easily
https://www.whatshalfway.com/ does exactly what you want.
it absolutely does not. they said 3 points
This is an issue that my friends and I wanted to solve so we made an app called Meet Between. Check it out on the iOS app store.