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Asymptote
Definitions
- 1 A straight line which a curve approaches arbitrarily closely as it goes to infinity. The limit of the curve; its tangent "at infinity".
"The King rushed forward with all his cruel coordinates and mean values, stumbled into a dark forest of roots and logarithms, had to backtrack, then encountered the beast on a field of irrational numbers (F₁) and smote it so grievously that it fell two decimal places and lost an epsilon, but the beast slid around an asymptote and hid in an n-dimensional orthogonal phase space, underwent expansion and came out, fuming factorially, and fell upon the King and hurt him passing sore."
- 2 a straight line that is the limiting value of a curve; can be considered as tangent at infinity wordnet
- 3 Anything which comes near to but never meets something else. broadly, figuratively
"Language, in relation to thought, must ever be regarded as an asymptote."
- 1 To approach, but never quite touch, a straight line, as something goes to infinity.
"2006: Neil deGrasse Tyson, The Perimeter of Ignorance As you become more scientific, yes, the religiosity drops off, but it asymptotes."
Etymology
circa 1650, from Ancient Greek ἀσύμπτωτη (asúmptōtē), the feminine of Apollonius Pergaeus' (circa 200 BC) Ancient Greek adjective ἀσύμπτωτος (asúmptōtos, “not falling together”), from ἀ- (a-, “not”) + συν- (sun-, “together”) + πτωτός (ptōtós, “fallen”).
circa 1650, from Ancient Greek ἀσύμπτωτη (asúmptōtē), the feminine of Apollonius Pergaeus' (circa 200 BC) Ancient Greek adjective ἀσύμπτωτος (asúmptōtos, “not falling together”), from ἀ- (a-, “not”) + συν- (sun-, “together”) + πτωτός (ptōtós, “fallen”).
See also for "asymptote"
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