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An oval (from Latin ovum 'egg') is a closed curve in a plane which resembles the outline of an egg.The term is not very specific, but in some areas (projective geometry, technical drawing, etc.) it is given a more precise definition, which may include either one or two axes of symmetry of an ellipse.
For example, a circle swept along a straight axis would define a cylinder (see Figure). A rectangle swept along a straight axis would define a "brick" (see Figure). Four dimensions with contrastive values (i.e., mutually exclusive values) define the current set of geons (see Figure): Shape of cross section: round vs. straight.
This glossary of biology terms is a list of definitions of fundamental terms and concepts used in biology, the study of life and of living organisms.It is intended as introductory material for novices; for more specific and technical definitions from sub-disciplines and related fields, see Glossary of cell biology, Glossary of genetics, Glossary of evolutionary biology, Glossary of ecology ...
The term was introduced in the 1972 publication Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living by Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela to define the self-maintaining chemistry of living cells. [2] The concept has since been applied to the fields of cognition, neurobiology, systems theory, architecture and sociology.
The spherical Earth is navigated using flat maps or charts, collected in an atlas. Similarly, a manifold can be described using mathematical maps, called coordinate charts, collected in a mathematical atlas. It is not generally possible to describe a manifold with just one chart, because the global structure of the manifold is different from ...
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In evolutionary biology, a spandrel is a phenotypic trait that is a byproduct of the evolution of some other characteristic, rather than a direct product of adaptive selection. Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin brought the term into biology in their 1979 paper " The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the ...
To the definition of an oval: e: exterior (passing) line, t: tangent, s: secant. In projective geometry an oval is a point set in a plane that is defined by incidence properties. The standard examples are the nondegenerate conics. However, a conic is only defined in a pappian plane, whereas an oval may exist in any type of projective plane. In ...