orthogonal : Dictionary / Wörterbuch (BEOLINGUS, TU Chemnitz)

English Dictionary: orthogonal	by the DICT Development Group
4 results for orthogonal
From WordNet (r) 3.0 (2006) [wn]:
orthogonal adj not pertinent to the matter under consideration; "an issue extraneous to the debate"; "the price was immaterial"; "mentioned several impertinent facts before finally coming to the point" Synonym(s): extraneous, immaterial, impertinent, orthogonal statistically unrelated having a set of mutually perpendicular axes; meeting at right angles; "wind and sea may displace the ship's center of gravity along three orthogonal axes"; "a rectangular Cartesian coordinate system" Synonym(s): orthogonal, rectangular
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]:
Orthogonal \Orthog"onal\, a. [Cf. F. orthogonal.] Right-angled; rectangular; as, an orthogonal intersection of one curve with another. {Orthogonal projection}. See under {Orthographic}.
From Jargon File (4.2.0, 31 JAN 2000) [jargon]:
orthogonal adj. [from mathematics] Mutually independent; well separated; sometimes, irrelevant to. Used in a generalization of its mathematical meaning to describe sets of primitives or capabilities that, like a vector basis in geometry, span the entire `capability space' of the system and are in some sense non-overlapping or mutually independent. For example, in architectures such as the PDP-11 or VAX where all or nearly all registers can be used interchangeably in any role with respect to any instruction, the register set is said to be orthogonal. Or, in logic, the set of operators `not' and `or' is orthogonal, but the set `nand', `or', and `not' is not (because any one of these can be expressed in terms of the others). Also used in comments on human discourse: "This may be orthogonal to the discussion, but...."
From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (15Feb98) [foldoc]:
orthogonal At 90 degrees (right angles). N mutually orthogonal {vectors} {span} an N-dimensional {vector space}, meaning that, any vector in the space can be expressed as a {linear combination} of the vectors. This is true of any set of N {linearly independent} vectors. The term is used loosely to mean mutually independent or well separated. It is used to describe sets of primitives or capabilities that, like linearly independent vectors in geometry, span the entire "capability space" and are in some sense non-overlapping or mutually independent. For example, in logic, the set of operators "not" and "or" is described as orthogonal, but the set "nand", "or", and "not" is not (because any one of these can be expressed in terms of the others). Also used loosely to mean "irrelevant to", e.g. "This may be orthogonal to the discussion, but ...", similar to "going off at a tangent". See also {orthogonal instruction set}. [{Jargon File}] (2002-12-02)