Metric Problems for Quadrics in Multidimensional Space
  Given the equations of the first and the second order surfaces in multidimensional space, our goal is to construct a univariate polynomial one of the zeros of which coincides with the square of the distance between these surfaces. To achieve this goal we employ Elimination Theory methods. The proposed approach is also extended for the case of parameter dependent surfaces. 
Alexei Yu. Uteshev and Marina V. Yashina
cs.SC math.AG