Equation for testing if a point is inside a circle

Question

If you have a circle with center (center_x, center_y) and radius radius, how do you test if a given point with coordinates (x, y) is inside the circle?

Answer 1

You can use Pythagoras to measure the distance between your point and the centre and see if it's lower than the radius:

def in_circle(center_x, center_y, radius, x, y):
    dist = math.sqrt((center_x - x) ** 2 + (center_y - y) ** 2)
    return dist <= radius

EDIT (hat tip to Paul)

In practice, squaring is often much cheaper than taking the square root and since we're only interested in an ordering, we can of course forego taking the square root:

def in_circle(center_x, center_y, radius, x, y):
    square_dist = (center_x - x) ** 2 + (center_y - y) ** 2
    return square_dist <= radius ** 2

Also, Jason noted that <= should be replaced by < and depending on usage this may actually make sense even though I believe that it's not true in the strict mathematical sense. I stand corrected.

Answer 2

My answer in C# as a complete cut & paste (not optimized) solution:

public static bool PointIsWithinCircle(double circleRadius, double circleCenterPointX, double circleCenterPointY, double pointToCheckX, double pointToCheckY)
{
    return (Math.Pow(pointToCheckX - circleCenterPointX, 2) + Math.Pow(pointToCheckY - circleCenterPointY, 2)) < (Math.Pow(circleRadius, 2));
}

Usage:

if (!PointIsWithinCircle(3, 3, 3, .5, .5)) { }

Answer 3

Here is the simple java code for solving this problem:

and the math behind it : https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/198764/how-to-know-if-a-point-is-inside-a-circle

boolean insideCircle(int[] point, int[] center, int radius) {
    return (float)Math.sqrt((int)Math.pow(point[0]-center[0],2)+(int)Math.pow(point[1]-center[1],2)) <= radius;
}