degree of freedom
degree of freedom
1900–05
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2012.
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| a children's mummer's parade, as on the Fourth of July, with prizes for the best costumes. |
| a calculus or concretion found in the stomach or intestines of certain animals, esp. ruminants, formerly reputed to be an effective remedy for poison. |
| degree of freedom | |
| —n | |
| 1. | physics one of the minimum number of parameters necessary to describe a state or property of a system |
| 2. | one of the independent components of motion (translation, vibration, and rotation) of an atom or molecule |
| 3. | chem See also phase rule one of a number of intensive properties that can be independently varied without changing the number of phases in a system |
| 4. | statistics one of the independent unrestricted random variables constituting a statistic |
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degree of freedom
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Copyright © 2002. Published by Houghton Mifflin. All rights reserved.
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degree of freedom
in mathematics, any of the number of independent quantities necessary to express the values of all the variable properties of a system. A system composed of a point moving without constraints in space, for example, has three degrees of freedom because three coordinates are needed to determine the position of the point
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