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Differential   /dˌɪfərˈɛnʃəl/  /dˌɪfərˈɛntʃəl/   Listen
Differential

noun
1.
The result of mathematical differentiation; the instantaneous change of one quantity relative to another; df(x)/dx.  Synonyms: derivative, derived function, differential coefficient, first derivative.
2.
A quality that differentiates between similar things.
3.
A bevel gear that permits rotation of two shafts at different speeds; used on the rear axle of automobiles to allow wheels to rotate at different speeds on curves.  Synonym: differential gear.



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"Differential" Quotes from Famous Books



... the imposition of a differential duty of 50 cents per ton upon Spanish vessels entering ports ...
— Messages and Papers of Rutherford B. Hayes - A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • James D. Richardson

... young De Saussure, grandson of the naturalist of that name, who, the first with a single exception, reached the summit of Mont Blanc. The subject of our lecture was some puzzling proposition in the differential calculus, and De Saussure propounded to the professor a knotty difficulty in connection with it. The professor replied unsatisfactorily. My friend still pressed his point, and the professor rejoined very learnedly and ingeniously, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various

... building up a sentiment favoring them before the lower-priced Barcelona variety. The Barcelona is a more vigorous tree and shells out of the husk 75% whereas the Du Chilly is but 40% self husking, but that will not offset the differential of five to ten cents per pound in favor of the ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting • Various

... nervously. He had never known her so queer before. Perhaps it was some literary allusion that he had not caught; but her face did not at that moment suggest literature. In the differential tones that one uses to an old and infirm person he said "Stephen Wonham isn't my ...
— The Longest Journey • E. M. Forster

... worn-out boxes, shaky foundations, and uneven tables, sometimes with the plates not half amalgamated, or coated with impurities, the whole concern superintended by a man who knows as little about the treatment of auriferous quartz by the amalgamating or any other processes as a dingo does of the differential calculus. Result: 3 dwt. to the ton in the retort, 30 dwt. in the tailings, and a payable ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson

... basis of our present findings it is no longer enough to trace the appearing of the after-image solely to a differential fatigue in the retina. The fact is that as long as the eye is turned to the bright window-pane a more intensive blood-activity occurs in the portions of the eye's background met by the light than in those where the dark window-bar throws its shadow on the ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs

... with respect to their subjects, may be divided into the speculative, the practical, and such as are of a mixed nature. The subjects of these last are either general, comprehending both the others; or differential, distinguishing them. The general subject are either fundamental, or final: those of the fundamental kind are philosophy, human nature, the soul of man; of the final kind are love, beauty, good. The differential regard knowledge, as it stands ...
— Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato • Thomas Taylor

... own existence. The 'objections,' as he puts it, are only 'difficulties'; they make it hard to understand the theory, but are no more reasons for rejecting it than would be the difficulty which a non-mathematical mind finds in understanding the differential calculus for rejecting 'Taylor's theorem.' And, so far, the difference is rather in the process than the conclusion. Newman believes in God on the testimony of an inner voice, so conclusive and imperative that he can dismiss all apparently contradictory facts, and even afford, for controversial ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... maintained, that with time and patience, one might train a rather stupid plough-boy to understand the differential calculus. This might be done with the help of an inward desire on the part of the boy to learn, but never otherwise. If the boy wants to learn or to improve generally, he will do so in spite of every hindrance, till in time he becomes a very different being from what he ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler

... consider it were more fitting to place the present species in a distinct genus, as Polyporus is set off from Hydnum. A species based upon the color of the vegetative phase only, unconfirmed by any subsequent differential character in the fruit would seem somewhat hazardous. The color of the plasmodium is incident probably to varied nutrient environment. Pores, however, are ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride

... DIFFERENTIAL WEATHERING. This term covers all cases in which a rock mass weathers differently in different portions. Any weaker spots or layers are etched out on the surface, leaving the more resistant in relief. Thus massive ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton

... DIFFERENTIAL DIAGNOSIS.—The diagnosis of hog-cholera in the field must depend on the clinical symptoms, post-mortem lesions and history of the outbreak. The history should be that of a ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.

... piece, with a variation which is immense in its range, but fairly continuous in its gradation. These are thus two aspects from which the phenomena of price and rent can be regarded; aspects which it is usual to call, (1) the scarcity aspect, (2) the differential aspect. ...
— Supply and Demand • Hubert D. Henderson

... the country amounted, in round figures, to about L5,000,000 sterling in imports, and somewhat less in exports The imports were chiefly manufactures from Great Britain, and the exports were lumber, wheat and fish. Those were days when colonial trade was stimulated by differential duties in favour of colonial products, and the building of vessels was encouraged by the old navigation laws which shut out foreign commerce from the St. Lawrence and the Atlantic ports, and kept the carrying trade between Great Britain and the colonies in the ...
— Canada under British Rule 1760-1900 • John G. Bourinot

... this opportunity of refuting the error. He says that Fabianism advocates the socialisation of rent, and in confirmation quotes Shaw's words "rent and interest"! That makes all the difference. If the term rent is widened to include all differential unearned incomes, from land, from ability, from opportunity (i.e. special profits), interest includes all non-differential unearned incomes, and thus the State is to be endowed, not with rents alone, but with all unearned incomes.[52] It is true that the Fabians, ...
— The History of the Fabian Society • Edward R. Pease

... I thought concerning the tariff on aluminium hydrates, and how I stood about the opening of the Tento Pu Reservation of the Comanche Indians, and what were my ideas about the differential rate of ...
— A Gentleman from Mississippi • Thomas A. Wise

... simpler. They spoke the language which afterwards became the Anglo-Saxon of Alfred, and the English of Milton. In this we have the first and most definite of their differential characteristics—the characteristics which distinguished them from the closely allied Cheruscans, Chamavi, Angrivarii and other less ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham

... to lights extinguished, and that it compensates for speed variations above the minimum speed. The manner of its action is to control the generation of current at the source in the armature, and it does so by combining certain electrical actions so as to obtain a differential effect, such that when small force of current only is required it alone is furnished, and when the maximum force is needed the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various

... Leibnitz mentioned in a letter to Oldenburg (to be communicated to Newton) that he had been for some time in possession of a method for drawing tangents, and explains the method, which was no other than the differential calculus. Before Newton had published a single word upon fluxions the differential calculus had made rapid advances on ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton

... the penultimate hundred yards were covered with fixed bayonets. In this manner we were prepared for any surprise. The enemy replied fitfully to our fire, and we could now see several khaki-clad figures with white hat-bands—the differential symbols—moving backwards and forwards amidst the trees. Presently they disappeared as we worked nearer to their lines. We were now rushing forward, lying down to fire, rising and running only to drop down ...
— The Amateur Army • Patrick MacGill

... foot, or even better weapons, would often lead to victory as well as mere physical strength. Moreover, this kind of more or less perpetual war goes on amongst savage peoples. It could lead, therefore, to no differential characters, but merely to the keeping up of a certain average standard of bodily ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin

... obstructing his study, was in reality an aid to his thinking and a spur to excellence—not excellence over others, but over himself. There were moments, doubtless, long moments too, in which he forgot Homer and Cicero and differential calculus and chemistry, for "the bonnie lady-lassie,"—that was what he called her to himself; but it was only, on emerging from the reverie, to attack his work with fresh vigour. She was so young, so plainly girlish, ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald

... cylinder heads, and adjust cams, and spend hours knocking everything to pieces and putting them together again so that I might be prepared for getting on without him. He said he hated to think of that time, and what do you suppose he did? I was lying under the machine at the time, studying the differential, while he was jacking up an axle. Proposed, positively. I dropped a nut and a cotter pin out of my mouth, I was so astonished. We talked it over for about five minutes through one of the artillery, wheels, and I must say he took it beautifully. I wanted to be nice to him, because he had been so patient ...
— The Motormaniacs • Lloyd Osbourne

... Challis—and at the mention of that conversation his brows drew together and he became very grave again; "but in the course of that conversation this child had occasion to refer, by way of illustration, to some abstruse theorem of the differential calculus. He did it, you will understand, by way of making his meaning clear—though the illustration was utterly beyond me: that reference represented an ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford

... start the engine in the morning, and the same number to persuade her to leave off firing at night. The works manager, Mr. Nathan, whose Christian name was Abraham, said that she'd done eighty miles an hour with him easily; but the only time I got her over fifty she broke her differential by way of an argument, and nothing but a soft place in a hayfield saved me from the hospital. All of which, of course, was good advertisement for the firm—and, truly, if it came to making a noise in the world, why, you could hear their car a good quarter ...
— The Man Who Drove the Car • Max Pemberton

... wouldn't like that. But you have to admit he's been fighting the idea, intellectually and emotionally, right from the start. Why, they could sit down with pencils and slide rules and start working differential calculus and it wouldn't ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper

... York and Chicago, the two best equipped roads charge a fare of twenty dollars on their ordinary, and a higher rate on their limited, trains. Because of slower time the other roads charge a sum less by two or three dollars for the same service. This cut in the rate is called a "differential." ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway

... components which pass together to one pole. Examples of this are Syromaster, Phylloxera, Agalena. In a third class the sex-chromosome is accompanied by a fellow which is usually smaller, and the two separate at the differential division. The sizes of the two differ in different degrees, from cases as in many Coleoptera and Diptera in which the smaller chromosome is very minute, to those (Benacus, Mineus) in which it is almost as ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham

... ISAAC (1642-1727).—Natural philosopher, b. at Woolsthorpe, Lincolnshire, the s. of a small landed proprietor, and ed. at the Grammar School of Grantham and at Trinity Coll., Camb. By propounding the binomial theorem, the differential calculus, and the integral calculus, he began in 1665 the wonderful series of discoveries in pure mathematics, optics, and physics, which place him in the first rank of the philosophers of all time. He was elected Lucasian Prof. of Mathematics at ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin

... concerned mainly Great Britain. Presumably it was profitable on both sides, for all trade is barter. In any event, Great Britain has never raised a tariff wall against it, never protected her traders by a single differential duty. She has risen above the idea that by tariff exactions the foreigners can be made to pay the sages. As for envy of German commerce, who ever heard of an ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86

... forms of machines. The lever, the wedge, the inclined plane—Father—and here we come to further consider the application of this principle, my dear Charles, to what is known as the differential wheel and axle. Um Charles—Father—Charles. Father." (He looks up despairingly at MARY.) No good, my dear. Out of date. (He, however, resumes reading the ...
— The Drone - A Play in Three Acts • Rutherford Mayne

... is said to be equally versed in Law, Physic, and Divinity, to sport with trigonometry, and to amuse his lighter moments with the differential calculus. But "this knowledge was too wonderful for him, he could not attain unto it," and to avoid confession of defeat, he fled with lightning speed. This erudite doctor is well known in England, especially among riflemen. Colonel Saunderson describes him as a wonderful shot at a thousand ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)

... I've always admitted that you were simply perfect,' Harry said, glancing at her with visible admiration, 'and I don't think anything on earth could possibly improve you—except perhaps a judicious course of differential and integral calculus, which might possibly serve to tone down slightly your exuberant and excessive vitality. Still, you know, from the point of view of society, which is a force we have always to reckon with—a constant, in fact, that we may call Pi—there can ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen

... remarkable muscular strength and skill in managing herself in the accomplishment of feats which looked impossible at first sight. How often The Terror had thought to herself that she would gladly give up all her knowledge of Greek and the differential and integral calculus if she could only perform the least of those feats which were mere play to The Wonder! Miss Euthymia was not behind the rest in her attainments in classical or mathematical knowledge, and she was one of the very best students in the out-door ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... retiring, an estated squire-arch, to the otium cum., or sine dignitate, as the case might be, of a country life; and this disposition had of late been much quickened by daily-increasing apprehensions of negro emancipation and revolutionary interference with differential duties—changes which, in conjunction with others of similar character, would infallibly bring about that utter commercial ruin which Mr. Linden, like every other rich and about-to-retire merchant or tradesman whom I have ever known, constantly prophesied ...
— The Experiences of a Barrister, and Confessions of an Attorney • Samuel Warren

... used by the creature in laying its eggs, we should then have, with the spring, an additional point of resemblance to the Neuroptera and higher insects, and instead of this spring being an important differential character, separating the Thysanura from other insects, it binds them still closer, though still differing greatly in representing only a part of the ovipositor of the higher insects. (This is a catch for ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard

... was told to come, and sat down to a stock of foolscap, and had a pretty stiff exam. I am only just through. I had seamanship, gunnery, navigation, nautical astronomy, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, conic sections, curve tracing, differential and integral calculus. I had only three questions out of five to answer in each branch, but in the first three I answered all five. After that I only had time for three, but at the end he said I need not finish, he was perfectly satisfied. I had done remarkably well, and he would report ...
— Real Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis

... Australians, a somewhat different complexion is put upon the state of their culture. With very plain living went something that approached to high thinking; and we must recognize in this case, as in others, what might be termed a differential evolution of culture, according to which some elements may advance, whilst others stand ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett

... considerable social usefulness—and that it grades off almost imperceptibly into dementia praecox. The features differentiating these two diseases should therefore supply us with data for determining the prognosis. A case undoubtedly, praecox, which shows markedly the differential features of paranoia, should have a proportionately better outlook. In a vague way our common sense uses this standard when it makes us "feel" that the case will have a long course which shows a relatively ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... midst of cruel sufferings, a method which embraced all the problems—a method founded upon the summation of certain series, of which he had given the elements in his writings accompanying his ‘Traité du Triangle Arithmétique.’ From this discovery there was only a step to that of the Differential and Integral Calculus; and it may be confidently presumed that, if Pascal had proceeded with his mathematical studies, he would have anticipated Leibnitz and Newton in the ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch

... the far end of a telescope. Sainte-Beuve, as he grew older, came to regard all experience as a single great book, in which to study for a few years ere we go hence; and it seemed all one to him whether you should read in Chapter xx., which is the differential calculus, or in Chapter xxxix., which is hearing the band play in the gardens. As a matter of fact, an intelligent person, looking out of his eyes and hearkening in his ears, with a smile on his face all the time, will get more ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson

... magnitude on February 22, 1901. This "star," the paper tells us, when studied by its spectrum, is seen to be due to the impact of two swarms of meteors out in space—swarms moving in different directions "with a differential velocity of something like seven hundred miles a second." Every astronomer of to-day understands how such a record is read from the displacement of lines on the spectrum, as recorded on the photographic negative. But imagine ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams

... his scholars; for it is not this faculty which made him their ideal, however it may have attracted them. All which sensible men deplore in him is that which poetasters have exalted in him. His morbidity and his doubt have become in their eyes his differential energy, because too often, it was all in him with which they had wit to sympathise. They found it easy to curse and complain, instead of helping to mend. So had he. They found it pleasant to confound institutions ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... of this difficulty in unweaving the maze, has its source in a misconception of the original machinery by which Christianity moved, and of the initial principle which constituted its differential power. In books, at least, I have observed one capital blunder upon the relations which Christianity bears to Paganism: and out of that one mistake, grows a liability to others, upon the possible relations of Christianity to the total drama of this world. I will endeavor to explain my views. ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey

... complex melodies; but he would be as unable to compose symphonies as Archimedes would have been to invent an electric dynamo. How many creators have been wrecked because the conditions necessary for their inventions were lacking? Roger Bacon foresaw several of our great discoveries; Cardan, the differential calculus; Van Helmont, chemistry; and it has been possible to write a book on the forerunners of Darwin.[71] We talk so much of the free flight of imagination, of the all-comprehensive power of the creator, that ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot

... good fortune to divine the future course of piano development, as also did Schumann. Both took for the strategic center of the piano the principle of what has been called the "differential touch," or discrimination in touch, by means of which not only long passages of different kinds were discriminated from one another, as in the Thalbergian melodies and their surrounding arabesques, but the infinitely finer discriminations which ...
— The Masters and their Music - A series of illustrative programs with biographical, - esthetical, and critical annotations • W. S. B. Mathews

... arithmetical progression, geometrical progression, harmonical progression[obs3]; percentage, permilage. figurate numbers[obs3], pyramidal numbers, polygonal numbers. power, root, exponent, index, logarithm, antilogarithm; modulus, base. differential, integral, fluxion[obs3], fluent. Adj. numeral, complementary, divisible, aliquot, reciprocal, prime, relatively prime, fractional, decimal, figurate[obs3], incommensurable. proportional, exponential, logarithmic, logometric[obs3], differential, fluxional[obs3], integral, totitive[obs3]. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... any practical knowledge of our savages will, I think, bear me out when I assert that, whatever their objections to consanguineous marriages may be, they have no more idea of the advantages of this or that sort of breeding, or of any laws of Nature bearing on the question, than they have of differential calculus."[177] ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... is below the noise level, simply because conversation is patterned. But this little generator of mine was non-random. It was the multiple recording of ten thousand different conversations, all meaningless, against a background of "white" noise. Try that one on your differential analyzers. ...
— A Spaceship Named McGuire • Gordon Randall Garrett

... national sense perhaps much more than the individual. We shall take it for granted that British and Irish products and manufactures enjoy a preference on import into the colonies, over imports from foreign countries, of at least five per cent, resulting from differential duties in favour of the parent state: it may be more, and we believe it will be found more; but such is the preference. This profit must be all to the account of the British exporter; for it is not received by the colonial custom-house, and whatever the reduction ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various

... strenuous work continued until the cave was large enough to hold all the mutton, and a considerable quantity of seal and penguin. Close to this larder Simpson and Wright were busy in excavating for the differential magnetic hut. ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley

... continuity of tradition and to share in a greater stability of life. The nerves are more annoyed, the thinking self less. Perhaps the difference between the two kinds of life may be tentatively expressed—not necessarily accounted for—in terms of Differential Evolution,[23] ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds

... doctrine of the nature of space which is not in essence inherent in the theory of the relativity of space. But this doctrine has never really been accepted in science, whatever people say. What appears in our dynamical treatises is Newton's doctrine of relative motion based on the doctrine of differential motion in absolute space. When you once admit that the points are radically different entities for differing assumptions of rest, then the orthodox formulae lose all their obviousness. They were only obvious because you were really thinking of something else. When ...
— The Concept of Nature - The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919 • Alfred North Whitehead

... you're right," said Warburton reflectively. "In any case, I know as much about art as I do about the differential calculus. To make money is a good and joyful thing as long as one doesn't bleed the poor. So go ahead, my son, and luck ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing

... so wasted as they seem to have been. Not only Functions of a Quaternion, but other of these books, chatty books about hydro-mechanics and dynamics of a particle (no, not an article—that might have been helpful—a particle), gossipy books about optics and differential equations, many of these have a comforting air of cleanness; as if, having bought them at the instigation of my instructor, I had felt that this was enough, and that their mere presence in my bookcase ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne



Words linked to "Differential" :   difference, differentiation, pinion and ring gear, reckoning, math, maths, partial, bevel gear, mathematics, figuring, computation, partial derivative, calculation, curvature, pinion and crown wheel



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