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