radar: Receiver noise: …radar engineers call a “matched filter,” which is a filter that maximizes the signal-to-noise ratio at the receiver output. The matched filter has a precise mathematical formulation that depends on the shape of the input signal and the character of the receiver noise. A suitable approximation to the matched…

hanafuda: The simplest game is matching flowers, in which a player takes tricks by matching a card in hand with any of the same suit on the board. When each month is tallied, bonus points are given for varying combinations of tanzaku and high-point cards. In the more-complicated and widely…

Christopher A. Pissarides: …to develop the concept of matching functions. Notably, he found that the more intensely job seekers looked for employment, the more jobs companies would offer because of the ease with which they could fill those positions.

gene-for-gene coevolution, a specific form of reciprocal evolutionary change based on the idea that, if one member of a coevolving relationship has a gene that affects the relationship, the other member has a gene to counter this effect. These genes evolve reciprocally and provide the genetic basis

animal learning: Generalized rule learning: …study of transfer is the “matching-to-sample” discrimination. A pigeon, for example, is required to choose between two disks, one illuminated with red light and the other with green light. The correct alternative on any one trial depends on the value of a sample stimulus, which is also part of each…

matchlock, in firearms, a device for igniting gunpowder developed in the 15th century, a major advance in the manufacture of small arms. The matchlock was the first mechanical firing device. It consisted of an S-shaped arm, called a serpentine, that held a match, and a trigger device that lowered

The Matchmaker, comedy in four acts by Thornton Wilder, produced in 1954 and published in 1955. The Matchmaker is more traditional than Wilder’s earlier plays, specifically Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth, although it does employ one of the playwright’s favourite nontraditional devices of having

Shirley Booth: …of Thornton Wilder’s stage play The Matchmaker (1958), the play upon which the musical Hello, Dolly! was based. Though the film and Booth’s performance were well received, it was to be her final appearance on the big screen.

eHarmony: …company providing online personal-relationship and matchmaking services. Founded in 2000 by Neil Clark Warren, a clinical psychologist, eHarmony is based in Pasadena, Calif. The company aims to unite compatible individuals in long-term relationships via scientific methods.

Ridley Scott: …of his trademark visual flair—include Matchstick Men (2003), Kingdom of Heaven (2005), American Gangster (2007), and Body of Lies (2008). He later helmed the action adventure Robin Hood (2010), which starred Crowe and Cate Blanchett; Prometheus (2012), a

mate, tealike beverage, popular in many South American countries, brewed from the dried leaves of an evergreen shrub or tree (Ilex paraguariensis) related to holly. It is a stimulating drink, greenish in colour, containing caffeine and tannin, and is less astringent than tea. Mate is especially

mate: The gourds, called mates or culhas, are often decorated and are sometimes silver mounted or covered with leather. Mate can also be prepared in similar vessels made out of wood or metal. The drink is often served plain and is sometimes flavoured with milk, sugar, herbs, coffee grounds,…

mate, tealike beverage, popular in many South American countries, brewed from the dried leaves of an evergreen shrub or tree (Ilex paraguariensis) related to holly. It is a stimulating drink, greenish in colour, containing caffeine and tannin, and is less astringent than tea. Mate is especially

Rudolph Maté was a Polish-born filmmaker who was best known for his work as a cinematographer, though he later had some success as a director. Maté studied at the University of Budapest. His film career began in 1919, after Alexander Korda hired him as an assistant cameraman. He worked in Berlin

Rudolph Maté was a Polish-born filmmaker who was best known for his work as a cinematographer, though he later had some success as a director. Maté studied at the University of Budapest. His film career began in 1919, after Alexander Korda hired him as an assistant cameraman. He worked in Berlin

animal social behavior: Social interactions involving sex: Although polygamy also involves mating with multiple partners, it often refers to cases in which individuals form relatively stable associations with two or more mates. Most such species exhibit polygyny, in which males have multiple partners. Some examples include the red-winged blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus) and house…

Orlando shooting of 2016: The shooter: The gunman, 29-year-old Omar Mateen, was a U.S. citizen born in Queens, New York, to Afghan parents. In May 2013 the Federal Bureau of Investigation declared Mateen to be “a person of interest” and launched a preliminary investigation of him after he told coworkers at a security firm…

Matehuala, city, northern San Luis Potosí estado (state), northeastern Mexico. It is situated in an interior plateau region of the Sierra Madre Oriental at 5,955 feet (1,815 metres) above sea level, in the Salado valley, east of the Catorce Mountains. Some corn (maize) is cultivated in the area,

Jan Matejko was a Polish painter, one of the most renowned in Polish history, who is known for his monumental Romantic canvases. He was one of the foremost artists of the 19th century working in the popular history painting genre. His best-known works, such as Stańczyk and The Battle of Grunwald,

Lesotho: Challenges in the 21st century: …party formed by business mogul Sam Matekane earlier that year—had campaigned on the need for change and pledged to crack down on corruption as well as work to improve the economy, messages that resonated with young voters and others. The RFP won 56 of the elected seats, which was more…

Prosper Mérimée: …of his best known stories, “Mateo Falcone” (1833), a father kills a son for betraying the family honour. The collection Mosaïque (1833) was followed by his most famous novellas: Colomba (1840), the story of a young Corsican girl who forces her brother to commit murder for the sake of a…

astrolabe: …parts: a base plate (the mater) with a network of lines representing celestial coordinates; an open-pattern disk (the rete) with a “map” of the stars, including the aforementioned circles, that rotated on the mater around a centre pin corresponding to the north celestial pole; and a straight rule (the alidade),…

Great Mother of the Gods, ancient Oriental and Greco-Roman deity, known by a variety of local names; the name Cybele or Cybebe predominates in Greek and Roman literature from about the 5th century bc onward. Her full official Roman name was Mater Deum Magna Idaea (Great Idaean Mother of the Gods).

Roman Catholicism: The Second Vatican Council: Of special interest is Mater et magistra (“Mother and Teacher”), published on May 15, 1961, the 70th anniversary of Rerum novarum. It explicitly aligned itself with Rerum novarum’s call for justice and the common good as the norms of social conduct. Two years later, in Pacem in terris (April…

Mater Matuta, in Roman religion, goddess of the ripening of grain (although the Latin poet Lucretius made her a goddess of dawn). Her worship in Italy was widespread and of ancient origin. Her temple at Rome, located in the Forum Boarium, was discovered under the Church of St. Omobono in 1937. The

Dublin: Health: …hospitals, including four university hospitals—the Mater Misericordiae, Beaumont, St. Vincent’s, and St. James’s. All have departments of international repute ranging from children’s care to transplants and diagnostics. The Mater is associated with University College Dublin and is the national centre for cardiothoracic surgery. Dublin’s Royal College of Surgeons is one…

Matera, city, Basilicata regione, southern Italy. It lies above a deep ravine northwest of Taranto. Of obscure origin, the town formed part of the duchy of Benevento and of the principality of Salerno and was occupied successively by the Normans, the Aragonese, and the Orsini. In the old part of

epistemology: St. Thomas Aquinas: …matter, which Aquinas called “common matter.” Common matter is contrasted with “individuated matter,” which is the stuff that constitutes the physical bulk of an object.

Spain: Science: …interest is merited by the Materia medica, a revision of the Eastern Arabic text of the 1st-century Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides ordered by al-Naṣir, on which Jews, Arabs, and Christians collaborated. Gradually the Andalusian Arabs kept adding new medicinal “simples”—which described the properties of various medicinal plants—to those described by…

materials science: …of the properties of solid materials and how those properties are determined by a material’s composition and structure. It grew out of an amalgam of solid-state physics, metallurgy, and chemistry, since the rich variety of materials properties cannot be understood within the context of any single classical discipline. With a…

economic planning: The work of Gosplan: …drawing up a series of material balances, which expressed anticipated supply of, and demand for, all key commodities. The successive versions of the plan were revised until a general balance was attained, since it was no use planning an increase in production of any item if the necessary additional machinery,…

treaty: In the case of a material breach—i.e., an impermissible repudiation of the treaty or a violation of a provision essential to the treaty’s object or purpose—the innocent party of a bilateral treaty may invoke that breach as a ground for terminating the treaty or suspending its operation. Multilateral treaties may…

Aristotle: Causation: This is called the material cause. Second, there is the form or pattern of a thing, which may be expressed in its definition; Aristotle’s example is the proportion of the length of two strings in a lyre, which is the formal cause of one note’s being the octave of…

material culture, tools, weapons, utensils, machines, ornaments, art, buildings, monuments, written records, religious images, clothing, and any other ponderable objects produced or used by humans. If all the human beings in the world ceased to exist, nonmaterial aspects of culture would cease to

telecommunications media: Optical fibres: …distortion in optical fibres are material dispersion and waveguide dispersion. Material dispersion is a phenomenon in which different optical wavelengths propagate at different velocities, depending on the refractive index of the material used in the fibre core. Waveguide dispersion depends not on the material of the fibre core but on…

envy: Material envy is resentment toward others who have more material fortune, such as money, talent, strength, beauty, or friends. Spiritual envy is resentment toward others’ spiritual goodness or those who have progressed in holiness. Spiritual envy is more evil than material envy and is considered…

equivalence, in logic and mathematics, the formation of a proposition from two others which are linked by the phrase “if, and only if.” The equivalence formed from two propositions p and q also may be defined by the statement “p is a necessary and sufficient condition for

fallacy: Material fallacies: The material fallacies are also known as fallacies of presumption, because the premises “presume” too much—they either covertly assume the conclusion or avoid the issue in view.

formal logic: Basic features of PC: … [then] q” or “p [materially] implies q”) is to count as false when p is true and q is false and as true in all other cases; hence it has the same meaning as “either not-p or q” or as “not both p and not-q.” The symbol “⊃” is…

predication: …excludes) the predicate; it is material if the entailment is contingent.

sin: Material sin consists of an act that is wrong in itself (because contrary to God’s law and human moral nature) but which the sinner does not know to be wrong and for which he is therefore not personally culpable.

history of logic: The theory of supposition: …(2) simple supposition, and (3) material supposition. These types are illustrated, respectively, by the occurrences of the term horse in the statements “Every horse is an animal” (in which the term horse refers to individual horses), “Horse is a species” (in which the term refers to a universal), and “Horse…

marketing: Marketing intermediaries: the distribution channel: Manufacturers use raw materials to produce finished products, which in turn may be sent directly to the retailer, or, less often, to the consumer. However, as a general rule, finished goods flow from the manufacturer to one or more wholesalers before they reach the retailer and, finally,…

Jorie Graham: Graham’s subsequent collections include Materialism (1993); The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974–1994 (1995), a survey of her work for which she received a Pulitzer Prize; and The Errancy (1997). In Swarm (2000) and Never (2002) she departed from her characteristic imagery-focused style.

materialism, in philosophy, the view that all facts (including facts about the human mind and will and the course of human history) are causally dependent upon physical processes, or even reducible to them. The word materialism has been used in modern times to refer to a family of metaphysical

Marxism: Lenin: …in Materializm i empiriokrititsizm (1908; Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1908). In 1912 at the Prague Conference the Bolsheviks constituted themselves as an independent party. During World War I Lenin resided in Switzerland, where he studied Hegel’s Science of Logic and the development of capitalism and carried on debates with Marxists like…

Celine Song: Materialists and upcoming projects: Celine Song’s second feature, Materialists (2025), similarly follows a female protagonist, played by Dakota Johnson, trying to decipher her relationship with two men: the “perfect guy” and her ex-boyfriend, a struggling actor, played respectively by Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans.

Spiritualism: History of Spiritualism: …of mediumship, especially the occasional materialization of spirit entities. Many who participated in psychic research hoped for positive results and occasionally concluded that they had proved the existence of clairvoyance or established the reality of spirit contact. Among the most prominent supporters of spiritualist claims was the chemist William Crookes…

Nicephorus Bryennius: …he wrote the chronicle (“Materials for a History”) of the Comnenus family in the 11th century, particularly during the years 1070–79. In addition to information derived from older contemporaries such as his father and his father-in-law and from official sources, Bryennius also used the works of Michael Psellus, Joannes…

materials handling, the movement of raw goods from their native site to the point of use in manufacturing, their subsequent manipulation in production processes, and the transfer of finished products from factories and their distribution to users or sales outlets. In early systems of handling

materials processing, series of operations that transform industrial materials from a raw-material state into finished parts or products. Industrial materials are defined as those used in the manufacture of “hard” goods, such as more or less durable machines and equipment produced for industry and

materials recovery facility (MRF), solid-waste management plant that processes recyclable materials to sell to manufacturers as raw materials for new products. MRFs are generally classified as either “clean” or “dirty,” depending on whether the facility handles materials that are mixed with other

materials recovery facility (MRF), solid-waste management plant that processes recyclable materials to sell to manufacturers as raw materials for new products. MRFs are generally classified as either “clean” or “dirty,” depending on whether the facility handles materials that are mixed with other

materials recovery facility (MRF), solid-waste management plant that processes recyclable materials to sell to manufacturers as raw materials for new products. MRFs are generally classified as either “clean” or “dirty,” depending on whether the facility handles materials that are mixed with other

recycling, recovery and reprocessing of waste materials for use in new products. The basic phases in recycling are the collection of waste materials, their processing or manufacture into new products, and the purchase of those products, which may then themselves be recycled. Typical materials that

materials science, the study of the properties of solid materials and how those properties are determined by a material’s composition and structure. It grew out of an amalgam of solid-state physics, metallurgy, and chemistry, since the rich variety of materials properties cannot be understood

Humans have long had an insatiable appetite for materials—natural resources, chemicals, building products, and everything in between. Materials-focused companies, including those listed in the S&P 500, operate to satisfy our demand for these physical products. Materials are made up of commodities,

materials testing, measurement of the characteristics and behaviour of such substances as metals, ceramics, or plastics under various conditions. The data thus obtained can be used in specifying the suitability of materials for various applications—e.g., building or aircraft construction,

Sweden: Manufacturing: …also has an advanced war matériel industry.

maternal imagination, idea that maternal thoughts during pregnancy are transmitted directly to the developing fetus, resulting in a congenital disorder at birth. Belief in maternal imagination was prevalent in Europe during the 16th to 18th centuries. Throughout the late Renaissance and

maternal imagination, idea that maternal thoughts during pregnancy are transmitted directly to the developing fetus, resulting in a congenital disorder at birth. Belief in maternal imagination was prevalent in Europe during the 16th to 18th centuries. Throughout the late Renaissance and

metabolic disease: Inheritance: …of the cell) is termed maternal (mitochondrial) inheritance. Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA), although much smaller than nuclear DNA, is critical in cellular metabolism. Most of the energy required by a cell to drive its metabolism is produced in mitochondria by proteins in a series of electron donor-acceptor reactions that make up…

Nicolae Ceaușescu: …to curtail their fertility, but maternal mortality rates skyrocketed as women sought unsafe and outlawed means to terminate their pregnancies. In an effort to pay off the large foreign debt that his government had accumulated through its mismanaged industrial ventures in the 1970s, Ceaușescu in 1982 ordered the export of…

maternal school, a French school for children between two and six years old. Private schools for young children were founded in France around 1779, under the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile. The central government took over most of them in 1833 and named them maternal schools, hoping

three-parent baby: Mitochondrial replacement therapy: In maternal spindle transfer, the nucleus is removed from a donor egg, leaving behind the cytoplasm. The nucleus from the mother’s egg cell is then inserted into the donor egg. The egg is fertilized with the father’s sperm and then transferred to the mother’s uterus for…

human genetic disease: Imprinted gene mutations: So-called maternally imprinted genes are generally expressed only when inherited from the father, and so-called paternally imprinted genes are generally expressed only when inherited from the mother. The disease gene associated with Prader-Willi syndrome is maternally imprinted, so that although every child inherits two copies of…

lactation: Composition and properties of milk: The nutritional status of the mother is important throughout this period. The mother’s daily caloric intake must increase significantly in order to replenish the mother’s nutrient and energy stores. The use of drugs or smoking by the mother can adversely affect the infant; many drugs are secreted in breast milk,…

public health: Variations among developed countries: …of statutes, of which the Maternity and Child Welfare Act (1918) was probably the most important, placed responsibility for most of the work on county governments. National health insurance (1911) gave benefits to 16 million workers and marked the beginning of a process upon which the National Health Service Act…

Sweden: Labour and taxation: …is well known for its maternity and parental leave schemes that allow up to 13 months’ leave at about four-fifths of their pay. Employers pay additional fees of more than two-fifths of gross wages for statutory social benefits, including pensions. As of 1999, a new general pension system was introduced,…

epistemology: Skepticism: The contemporary American philosopher Benson Mates, who claimed to be a modern representative of that tradition, held that all philosophical arguments are equally good.

Greek literature: Heptanesian School: …to cultivate the Demotic, particularly Antónios Mátesis, whose historical social drama, O vasilikós (1859; “The Basil Plant”), was the first prose work of any length to be written in the Demotic. Aristotélis Valaorítis continued the Heptanesian tradition with long patriotic poems inspired by the Greek national struggles.

José Luandino Vieira is an Angolan writer of short fiction and novels. Vieira immigrated with his parents to Angola in 1938, living in and around the musseques (African quarters) of Luanda. His writings reflect the fusion of Kimbundu (the language of the Mbundu people) and a variety of Portuguese

Juliusz Kaden-Bandrowski: …Barcz (1922–23; “General Barcz”), and Mateusz Bigda (1933; “Matthew Bigda”). The latter two satirically describe political life after Poland regained independence. Considered by many critics to offer caricatures of real political personalities (e.g., Józef Piłsudski), these novels evoked wide public reaction, mostly critical of the author’s unrestrained, often brutal depiction…

John Sayles: (1983); Baby, It’s You (1983); Matewan (1987), a drama about coal miners fighting to form a union in the 1920s; The Brother from Another Planet (1984), a science-fiction comedy that lacerates discrimination; City of Hope (1991); Passion Fish (1992), which earned Sayles an Academy Award nomination for a best original…

mathematics, the science of structure, order, and relation that has evolved from elemental practices of counting, measuring, and describing the shapes of objects. It deals with logical reasoning and quantitative calculation, and its development has involved an increasing degree of idealization and

Math, in the Welsh collection of stories known as the Mabinogion, king of Gwynedd in the North. He is also the brother of Dôn, who is probably the Welsh counterpart of the Irish goddess Danu. Whenever at peace, it was necessary for Math to have his feet upon a virgin’s lap. The virgin who held

Danica McKellar: …math among girls, she wrote Math Doesn’t Suck: How to Survive Middle-School Math Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail (2007), Kiss My Math: Showing Pre-Algebra Who’s Boss (2008), Hot X: Algebra Exposed! (2010), and Girls Get Curves: Geometry Takes Shape (2012). The popular books were written in the…

The Four Branches of the Mabinogi: Math fab Mathonwy (“Math Son of Mathonwy”) is a complex tale focusing on Math, a prince of northern Wales, his nephew Gwydion, and Gwydion’s nephew Lleu Llaw Gyffes (“Lleu Skilled Hand”); among many other events, Gwydion’s magic and duplicity lead to the death of Pryderi.…

number game, any of various puzzles and games that involve aspects of mathematics. Mathematical recreations comprise puzzles and games that vary from naive amusements to sophisticated problems, some of which have never been solved. They may involve arithmetic, algebra, geometry, theory of numbers,

number game, any of various puzzles and games that involve aspects of mathematics. Mathematical recreations comprise puzzles and games that vary from naive amusements to sophisticated problems, some of which have never been solved. They may involve arithmetic, algebra, geometry, theory of numbers,

matha, in Hinduism, any monastic establishment of world renouncers or sannyasis. The first mathas were founded by the great teacher Shankara in the 8th century ce. Shankara was said to have established four mathas at strategic points in India as bulwarks for Hindu missionary activity and as centres

Egyptian Museum, museum of Egyptian antiquities in Cairo, which was founded in the 19th century by the French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette and which housed the world’s most valuable collection of its kind into the 21st century. The Egyptian Museum was founded in 1858 at Būlāq, moved to Al-Jīzah

Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art, museum in Doha, Qatar, exhibiting works by artists from the Arab world. Mathaf’s name comes from the Arabic word for museum, matḥaf. (Read Sister Wendy’s Britannica essay on art appreciation.) Since Mathaf opened in December 2010, the collection has been displayed

Arabic literature: Compilations and manuals: …compilation, Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn ibn al-Athīr’s Al-Mathal al-sāʾir fī adab al-kātib wa al-shāʿir (“The Current Model for the Literary Discipline of the Scribe and Poet”), where the sequence of functions found in the title very much reflects the author’s own career as an accomplished writer of belles lettres. Ibn Rashīq’s Al-ʿUmdah…

Rudolph Maté was a Polish-born filmmaker who was best known for his work as a cinematographer, though he later had some success as a director. Maté studied at the University of Budapest. His film career began in 1919, after Alexander Korda hired him as an assistant cameraman. He worked in Berlin

Stephen Wolfram: …year to concentrate on marketing Mathematica, a computer program he had devised that allowed complex mathematical equations to be manipulated and solved algebraically, rather than using numerical analysis to find approximate solutions. Software sales made the physicist a millionaire and allowed him to finance his own research. The release of…

history of logic: Boole and De Morgan: Boole published two major works, The Mathematical Analysis of Logic in 1847 and An Investigation of the Laws of Thought in 1854. It was the first of these two works that had the deeper impact on his contemporaries and on the history of logic. The Mathematical Analysis of Logic arose…

Iannis Xenakis: He established the School of Mathematical and Automatic Music in 1966. Other works by Xenakis include Polla ta dhina for children’s chorus and orchestra (1962), Akrata (1964–65) for 16 wind instruments, and Cendrées (1974) for chorus and orchestra. He also composed works solely for electronic reproduction, such as…

philosophy of mathematics: Mathematical anti-Platonism: Many philosophers cannot bring themselves to believe in abstract objects. However, there are not many tenable alternatives to mathematical Platonism. One option is to maintain that there do exist such things as numbers and sets (and that mathematical theorems provide true descriptions of…

computational biology: Distinctions among related fields: …is more easily distinguished from mathematical biology, though there are overlaps. The older discipline of mathematical biology was concerned primarily with applications of numerical analysis, especially differential equations, to topics such as population dynamics and enzyme kinetics. It later expanded to include the application of advanced mathematical approaches in genetics,…

mathematics: Analytic geometry: …Géométrie was to achieve the construction of solutions to geometric problems by means of instruments that were acceptable generalizations of ruler and compass. Algebra was a tool to be used in this program:

expected value, in general, the value that is most likely the result of the next repeated trial of a statistical experiment. The probability of all possible outcomes is factored into the calculations for expected value in order to determine the expected outcome in a random trial of an experiment.

John von Neumann: European career, 1921–30: …culminated in von Neumann’s book The Mathematical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (1932), in which quantum states are treated as vectors in a Hilbert space. This mathematical synthesis reconciled the seemingly contradictory quantum mechanical formulations of Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg. Von Neumann also claimed to prove that deterministic

number game, any of various puzzles and games that involve aspects of mathematics. Mathematical recreations comprise puzzles and games that vary from naive amusements to sophisticated problems, some of which have never been solved. They may involve arithmetic, algebra, geometry, theory of numbers,

mathematical induction, one of various methods of proof of mathematical propositions, based on the principle of mathematical induction. A class of integers is called hereditary if, whenever any integer x belongs to the class, the successor of x (that is, the integer x + 1) also belongs to the

linguistics: Mathematical linguistics: What is commonly referred to as mathematical linguistics comprises two areas of research: the study of the statistical structure of texts and the construction of mathematical models of the phonological and grammatical structure of languages. These two branches of mathematical linguistics, which may…

formal logic, the abstract study of propositions, statements, or assertively used sentences and of deductive arguments. The discipline abstracts from the content of these elements the structures or logical forms that they embody. The logician customarily uses a symbolic notation to express such

mathematical model, either a physical representation of mathematical concepts or a mathematical representation of reality. Physical mathematical models include reproductions of plane and solid geometric figures made of cardboard, wood, plastic, or other substances; models of conic sections, curves

philosophy of mathematics: Nominalism: Nominalism is the view that mathematical objects such as numbers and sets and circles do not really exist. Nominalists do admit that there are such things as piles of three eggs and ideas of the number 3 in people’s heads, but they do not…