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