I'm sure it's been done. I've seen it illustrated in textbooks. Of course cities which are far from all the others provide better estimates, since the proportional distance error is smaller. Brent On 9/23/2018 8:50 PM, Keith F. Lynch wrote:
A much easier project is using a table of distances between cities to calculate the radius of the Earth. (Has anyone done that?) Any four cities will suffice, assuming a spherical Earth. With more cities you can tell more about Earth's shape. Or you can just try more subsets of four, and average all of the resulting values of radius to best approximate the correct radius of the spherical Earth. Should all sets of four cities be equally weighted? If not, what should determine their relative weightings, assuming all the distances between cities listed in the table are equally accurate and equally precise?