First, latitude is converted to radians. Next, it's multiplied by 6440, the approximate radius of the earth in kilometers. This gives us the length of the arc from the equator to the given latitude.
Lotus Notes/Domino treats an empty numeric field as a text field, so the formula uses @If to check for an empty latitude field.
@If( latitude = ""; 0; ( ( latitude * @Pi ) / 180 ) * 6440 )