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:
““There is Hawthorne, with genius so shrinking and rare
That you hardly at first see the strength that is there;
A frame so robust, with a nature so sweet,
So earnest, so graceful, so lithe and so fleet,
Is worth a descent from Olympus to meet;”
—James Russell Lowell (1819–1891)
“Genealogy. An account of one’s descent from an ancestor who did not particularly care to trace his own.”
—Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914)
“In the world of the celebrity, the hierarchy of publicity has replaced the hierarchy of descent and even of great wealth.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–1962)