Descent

Descent may refer to:

In genealogy and inheritance:

  • Common descent, concept in evolutionary biology
  • Kinship and descent, one of the major concepts of cultural anthropology
    • Pedigree chart or family tree
    • Ancestry
    • Heritage
  • Phylogenetics
    • Tree diagram (disambiguation)
  • Inheritance (law and property)

In mathematics:

  • Infinite descent, a method going back to Fermat to solve Diophantine equations
  • Descent (category theory), an idea extending the notion of "gluing" in topology
  • Hadamard's method of descent, a technique for solving partial differential equations
  • Gradient descent, a first-order optimization algorithm going back to Newton
  • Descents in permutations, a classical permutation statistic in combinatorics

Other uses:

  • Descent (aircraft), the decrease of an aircraft in altitude during flight
  • Descent (font), the distance that a typeface descends below the baseline in typography

Read more about Descent:  As A Proper Name

Famous quotes containing the word descent:

    My life has been one long descent into respectability.
    Mandy Rice-Davies (b. 1944)

    And every stone shall cry,
    In praises of the child
    By whose descent among us
    The worlds are reconciled.
    Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)

    Genealogy. An account of one’s descent from an ancestor who did not particularly care to trace his own.
    Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914)