Moments of distance from a vertex to a uniformly distributed random point within arbitrary triangles (Q1793654)

Summary: We study the cumulative distribution function (CDF), probability density function (PDF), and moments of distance between a given vertex and a uniformly distributed random point within a triangle in this work. Based on a computational technique that helps us provide unified formulae of the CDF and PDF for this random distance then we compute its moments of arbitrary orders, based on which the variance and standard deviation can be easily derived. We conduct Monte Carlo simulations under various conditions to check the validity of our theoretical derivations. Our method can be adapted to study the random distances sampled from arbitrary polygons by decomposing them into triangles.