Random Points on a Sphere

Requires a Wolfram Notebook System
Interact on desktop, mobile and cloud with the free Wolfram Player or other Wolfram Language products.
There are several ways to pick random points on a sphere. Using points of the form , where
and
, gives an evenly distributed set of points. Using spherical coordinates,
, causes too many points to cluster at the poles. Picking points at random in a cube around the sphere and normalizing,
, creates too many points that come from the corners of the cube.
Contributed by: Ed Pegg Jr (March 2011)
Open content licensed under CC BY-NC-SA
Snapshots
Details
detailSectionParagraphPermanent Citation
"Random Points on a Sphere"
http://demonstrations.wolfram.com/RandomPointsOnASphere/
Wolfram Demonstrations Project
Published: March 7 2011