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Discontinuous   Listen
adjective
Discontinuous  adj.  
1.
Not continuous; interrupted; broken off. "A path that is zigzag, discontinuous, and intersected at every turn by human negligence."
2.
Exhibiting a dissolution of continuity; gaping. "Discontinuous wound."
Discontinuous function (Math.), a function which for certain values or between certain values of the variable does not vary continuously as the variable increases. The discontinuity may, for example, consist of an abrupt change in the value of the function, or an abrupt change in its law of variation, or the function may become imaginary.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Discontinuous" Quotes from Famous Books



... steep force to smite Descending, and in half cut sheer; nor stayed But with swift wheel reverse, deep entering, shared All his right side. Then Satan first knew pain, And writhed him to and fro convolved; so sore The griding sword with discontinuous wound Passed through him." ...
— Raphael - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll

... complement of members. Moreover, he has often observed that objects which appear continuous when seen from a distance are evidently far from continuous when seen close at hand. As we walk toward a tree we can see the indefinite mass of color break up into discontinuous patches; a fabric, which presents the appearance of an unbroken surface when viewed in certain ways may be seen to be riddled with holes when held between the eye and the light. There is no man who has not some acquaintance with the distinction between appearance and reality, ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton

... his phrases flash and detonate, each page is full of unconnected sparks and electrical discharges. A sort of aurora borealis of wit streams and rustles across the dusky surface, amusing to the reader, but discontinuous, and insufficient to illuminate the matter in hand. It is extraordinary that a man can make so many picturesque, striking, and apparently apposite remarks, and yet leave us so frequently in doubt as to his meaning. If this was the result of the imitation of Aretino, Nash's choice of a master ...
— The Vnfortunate Traveller, or The Life Of Jack Wilton - With An Essay On The Life And Writings Of Thomas Nash By Edmund Gosse • Thomas Nash

... that which is immediately requisite for the right performance of their work. It is true that there is little enough of any such mental activity directed to the instructive uses we were supposing. But while such partial occupation of the thoughts (of course it is admitted, in an irregular and discontinuous, but still a beneficial manner) with topics and facts of what may be called intellectual and moral interest as we are assuming to be compatible with divers of the manual operations, is a thing to which most among the laboring classes are strangers, many of them are equally strangers ...
— An Essay on the Evils of Popular Ignorance • John Foster

... Intuition than to Intelligence. But man has found Intellect the more valuable faculty for practical use and so has used it for the solution of questions it was never intended to solve, by reason of its nature and origin. Yet "Intuition is there, but vague and, above all, discontinuous. It is a lamp almost extinguished which only glimmers now and then for a few moments at most. But it glimmers whenever a vital interest is at stake. On our personality, on our liberty, on the place we occupy in the whole of Nature, ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn

... substance of jars, viz. clay, only that is real while the reality of everything apart from clay is disproved by reasoning. And if you ask whereupon that reasoning rests, we reply—on the fact that the clay only is continuous, permanent, while everything different from it is discontinuous, non- permanent. For just as in the case of the snake-rope we observe that the continuously existing rope only—which forms the substrate of the imagined snake—is real, while the snake or cleft in the ground, which is non-continuous, is unreal; so we conclude that it is the ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut

... their discussions is the nature of life. Is it continuous, as it appears in vegetation and the animal kingdom, or is it discontinuous like the rocks on the mountainside or the grains of sand on the seashore? Those who live for the moment prefer discontinuity. Those who observe their natural environment are forced to the conclusion that life today is part of a sequence ...
— Civilization and Beyond - Learning From History • Scott Nearing

... half years, viz., from Edgehill Fight in the autumn of 1642, to the defeat of the king's last force under Sir Jacob Astley at Stow-in-the-walds in the spring of 1846. Any other fighting in that century belonged to mere insulated and discontinuous war. But the insecurity of every government between 1638 and 1702, kept the popular mind in a state of fermentation. Accordingly, Queen Anne's reign might be said to open upon an irreligious people. The condition of things was ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey

... descent of the individuals composing it from a common stock, of local origin. Agassiz wholly eliminates community of descent from his idea of species, and even conceives a species to have been as numerous in individuals and as wide-spread over space, or as segregated in discontinuous spaces, from the first ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray

... the wheat straw from between its huckleberry-stained teeth and emitted a derisive and bucolic laugh as old man Walmsley's freckle-faced "Bob" abandoned the certain three-per-diem meals of the one-horse farm for the discontinuous quick lunch counters of the three-ringed metropolis. At the end of the six years no murder trial, coaching party, automobile accident or cotillion was complete in which the name of Robert Walmsley did not figure. Tailors waylaid him in the street to get a new wrinkle from the cut ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry

... conditions permitted, is the most probable. Undoubtedly many cases occur in which we cannot explain how the same species could have passed from one point to the other. But the geographical and climatical changes which have certainly occurred within recent geological times, must have rendered discontinuous the formerly continuous range of many species. So that we are reduced to consider whether the exceptions to continuity of range are so numerous, and of so grave a nature, that we ought to give up the belief, rendered probable by general considerations, that each species has been ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin

... of poetry to move eternally through controversial discussions! 2ndly, that the teaching, from the very necessities of metre, must be eclectic; innumerable things must be suppressed; and how alien from the spirit of science to move by discontinuous links according to the capricious bidding of poetic decorum! Divinity itself is not more entangled in the necessities of fighting for every step in advance, and maintaining the ground by eternal preparation ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... coast, renders them less and less favorable to mankind. In southern Mexico and Yucatan the stately equatorial rain forest, the most exuberant of all types of vegetation and the most unconquerable by man, makes its appearance. It forms a discontinuous belt along the wet east coast and on the lower slopes of the mountains from southern Yucatan to Venezuela. Then it is interrupted by the grasslands of the Orinoco, but revives again in still greater magnificence in the Guianas. Thence it stretches not only along the coast but far into the little ...
— The Red Man's Continent - A Chronicle of Aboriginal America, Volume 1 In The - Chronicles Of America Series • Ellsworth Huntington

... tins of biscuits portrayed with a ghastly realism of perspective, and mendaciously screaming that I needed them—U-need-a biscuit; of gigantic quakers, multiplied as in an interminable series of mirrors and offering me a myriad meals of indigestible oats; of huge painted bulls in a kind of discontinuous frieze bellowing to the heavens a challenge to produce a better tobacco than theirs; of the head of a gentleman, with pink cheeks and a black moustache, recurring, like a decimal, ad infinitum on the top ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... was high, the farther side loomed up; here and there the near side dipped entirely and showed a broad path of water into the lagoon; here and there both sides were equally abased, and we could look right through the discontinuous ring to the sea horizon on the south. Conceive, on a vast scale, the submerged hoop of the duck-hunter, trimmed with green rushes to conceal his head—water within, water without—you have the image of the perfect atoll. Conceive one that has been ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson



Words linked to "Discontinuous" :   broken, math, disrupted, continuous, mathematics, maths



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