Serpentine shape
Encyclopedia
Serpentine refers to the curved shape of an object or design which resembles the letter
s
, a sine wave
or a snake
; the latter is the derivation of the term.
Letter (alphabet)
A letter is a grapheme in an alphabetic system of writing, such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants. Letters compose phonemes and each phoneme represents a phone in the spoken form of the language....
s
S
S is the nineteenth letter in the ISO basic Latin alphabet.-History: Semitic Šîn represented a voiceless postalveolar fricative . Greek did not have this sound, so the Greek sigma came to represent...
, a sine wave
Sine wave
The sine wave or sinusoid is a mathematical function that describes a smooth repetitive oscillation. It occurs often in pure mathematics, as well as physics, signal processing, electrical engineering and many other fields...
or a snake
Snake
Snakes are elongate, legless, carnivorous reptiles of the suborder Serpentes that can be distinguished from legless lizards by their lack of eyelids and external ears. Like all squamates, snakes are ectothermic, amniote vertebrates covered in overlapping scales...
; the latter is the derivation of the term.
Examples
- The Serpentine RiverSerpentine RiverSerpentine River may refer to:* Serpentine River, New Zealand* Serpentine River , Australia* Serpentine River * Serpentine River , Canada* Serpentine River , Canada...
- This shape is often used while riding horses as a riding figureRiding figuresRiding figures are prescribed paths a horse is ridden on in a riding arena, usually for training purposes. Figures may also be performed out in a field or other open area, but a riding arena provides markers that can help indicate the correctness in the size or shape of a figure.-Purposes of ring...
, to help train the animal and help improve the rider. - BoustrophedonBoustrophedonBoustrophedon , is a type of bi-directional text, mostly seen in ancient manuscripts and other inscriptions. Every other line of writing is flipped or reversed, with reversed letters. Rather than going left-to-right as in modern English, or right-to-left as in Arabic and Hebrew, alternate lines in...
text is ordered in a serpentine fashion. - The zigzag entropy coding used in JPEG imagesJPEGIn computing, JPEG . The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and image quality. JPEG typically achieves 10:1 compression with little perceptible loss in image quality....
is evocative of the serpentine. - Thomas JeffersonThomas JeffersonThomas Jefferson was the principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence and the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom , the third President of the United States and founder of the University of Virginia...
designed serpentine brick walls for the University of VirginiaUniversity of VirginiaThe University of Virginia is a public research university located in Charlottesville, Virginia, United States, founded by Thomas Jefferson...
. http://agoraphilia.blogspot.com/2006/03/jeffersons-wall-take-two.html http://www.columbia.edu/cu/gsapp/BT/EEI/MASONRY/17serpdwg.jpg - Sigmoid functionSigmoid functionMany natural processes, including those of complex system learning curves, exhibit a progression from small beginnings that accelerates and approaches a climax over time. When a detailed description is lacking, a sigmoid function is often used. A sigmoid curve is produced by a mathematical...
- Line of BeautyLine of BeautyThe Line of Beauty is a term and a theory in art or aesthetics used to describe an S-shaped curved line appearing within an object, as the boundary line of an object, or as a virtual boundary line formed by the composition of several objects...
