What is the distance between a hyperbola's vertex and center?

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What is the name for the distance between a hyperbola's center and vertex? Is this the semimajor axis? And, given an equation of a hyperbola, how can this distance be found?

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Both Wikipedia and Mathworld define the semi-major axis of a hyperbola exactly as you do; equivalently it's half the distance between the two branches.

This is useful for analogies to the ellipse; origin-centred Cartesian equations for the curves are $$\frac{x^2}{a^2}+\frac{y^2}{b^2}=1$$ for the ellipse and $$\frac{x^2}{a^2}-\frac{y^2}{b^2}=1$$ for the hyperbola, where $a$ and $b$ are the semi-axes.

It's possible to calculate the semi-major axis for a hyperbola in general position too (but a bit messy) - is that of interest?