Omega (Greek letter)

From Citizendium
Revision as of 17:56, 30 March 2008 by imported>Ro Thorpe
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Omega (uppercase Ω, lowercase ω) is the 24th and last letter of the Greek alphabet.[1] In the Greek numeric system, it has a value of 800.

Symbol uppercase Ω

Astronomy

  • density of the universe, also referred to as the cosmological density parameter. with components of mass density, ΩM, and vacuum energy density, ΩL.[2][3][4]

Chemistry

  • designation for the last carbon on the chain in a fatty acid

Electricity

  • Ohm: SI unit of electrical resistance
  • Siemens (unit), abbreviated S, is the reciprocal of the ohm.

Mathematics

  • Omega constant (Lambert’s W function)[5]
  • Chaitin’s constant: the probability that a randomly selected valid program string is interpreted by a halting

term[6]

  • Calculus: a 2-D region
  • A theoretical measure of the execution of an algorithm, (e.g. required time or memory) given the problem size n (e.g. the number of items).[7]
  • Stochastic process[8]

Meterology

  • Used to designate vertical motion in the atmosphere[9]

Statistics

  • Sample space
  • Set of possible outcomes

Literary

  • End or last thing in a series[10]

Physics

  • Solid angle or rate of precession in a gyroscope[11]
  • Omega baryons (particle physics)
  • Negatively charged elementary particle with a mass 3270 times the mass of an electron.[12]
  • Omega minus b: a very short-lived unstable meson with mass 1532 times the mass of an electron (aka omega meson)[13]

Symbol lowercase ω

Mathematics

  • The set of all natural numbers

References

  1. Greek Omniglot
  2. [1] Meteorite Book, Northern Arizona University
  3. Curvature Astrophysics
  4. Cosmological curvature Cosmology
  5. [2] Wolfram Math World
  6. [3] School of Computer Sciences, Carnegie Mellon University
  7. [4] National Institute of Standards and Technology
  8. Formal definition and basic properties Stochastic process
  9. [5] JetStream – Online school for weather, National Weather Service
  10. [6] Ask Oxford
  11. [7]Wolfram Math World
  12. [8] Merriam Webster Online
  13. [9] Merriam Webster Online