Laplacian, Further, the inverse Jacobian in Cartesian coordinates is The metric tensor in the spherical coordinate system is . Distance in spherical coordinates In spherical coordinates, given two points with being the azimuthal coordinate The distance between the two points can be expressed as Kinematics In spherical coordinates, the position of a point or particle (although better written as a triple) can be written as Its velocity is then and its acceleration is The angular momentum is Where is mass. In the case of a constant or else , this reduces to vector calculus in polar coordinates. The corresponding angular momentum operator then follows from the phase-space reformulation of the above, The torque is given as The kinetic energy is given as See also Notes Bibliography External links MathWorld description of spherical coordinates Coordinate Converter — converts between polar, Cartesian and spherical coordinates Three-dimensional coordinate systems Orthogonal coordinate systems fi:Koordinaatisto#Pallokoordinaatisto