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Solution: Check If It Is a Straight Line

Explore how to verify if a set of 2D points lies on a straight line by calculating and comparing slopes using a cross-multiplication method. Understand handling of edge cases such as vertical lines and improve your problem-solving skills for math and geometry coding challenges.

Statement

You are given an array, coordinates, where each element in coordinates[i] =[x,y]= [x, y] represents the coordinates of a point on a 2D\text{2D} plane. Determine whether all the points in the array lie on a single straight line in the XY plane.

Constraints:

  • 22 \leq coordinates.length 1000\leq 1000

  • coordinates[i].length ==2== 2

  • 104-10^4 \leq coordinates[i][0]coordinates[i][1] 104\leq 10^4

  • coordinates do not contain any duplicate points.

Solution

We need to determine whether a given array of coordinates in a 2D\text{2D} plane lies in a single straight line. This problem is approached using the Math and Geometry pattern, using the slope of a straight line.

Key intuition:

The slope represents the change in y-coordinates\text{y-coordinates} relative to the change in x-coordinates\text{x-coordinates} for any two points on the line. So, the slope between two points,  ...