Distance between points and ellipse

Compute the distances between an ellipse and an arbitrary number of points, in 3D

The solution to the problem of calculating the distance between an ellipse and a point is less than straightforward. The problem can be solved analytically however, which boild down to solving a quartic equation in cos(f), with (f) the true anomaly on the ellipse.
This submission implements this and computes the distances between any 3-D ellipse and an arbitrary number of 3-D points.
This is part of:
Ik-Sung Kim: "An algorithm for finding the distance between two ellipses". Commun. Korean Math. Soc. 21 (2006), No.3, pp.559-567
See also my other submission, distanceEllipseEllipse.