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:
“When power becomes gracious and descends into the visiblesuch descent I call beauty.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (18441900)
“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)