Euclidean distance of two vectors

Question

How do I find the Euclidean distance of two vectors:

x1 <- rnorm(30)
x2 <- rnorm(30)

Answer 1

Use the dist() function, but you need to form a matrix from the two inputs for the first argument to dist():

dist(rbind(x1, x2))

For the input in the OP's question we get:

> dist(rbind(x1, x2))
        x1
x2 7.94821

a single value that is the Euclidean distance between x1 and x2.