The first (and most typical) way to find distance of two points is by using the distance formula.
[tex]distance=\sqrt{(x_{2}-x_{1})^2+(y_{2}-y_{1})^2 }[/tex]
One alternative is the Manhattan metric, also called the taxicab metric. This option is much more complicated, and rarely used in high school math. d(x,y)=∑i|xi-yi|