Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Mathematics Of or relating to maximal or minimal values or degrees of inclusiveness.
  • adjective Having or characterized by extreme properties or conditions.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective mathematics Having to do with extrema.
  • noun mathematics Any solution to a variety of equations in the calculus of variations

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

extreme +‎ -al

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Examples

  • Penrose hypothesizes that the extremal is a graviton.

    Causal Consciousness – Science of Mind 2005

  • It is disingenious to ascribe every heat wave to global warming but explain away all extremal cold events as "just weather".

    Giving evidence to the Chilcot inquiry, Tony Blair said: “I... 2010

  • But at current and projected scientific abilities I cannot expect much more than what's offered – a collapsing extremal of baseline fundamental nature, even if there's no such thing as actually collapsed extremals.

    Continuation… 2008

  • I suspect there is some extremal principle here, where the tuning is some variational principle on a partition function which results in a greatest upper bound on the measure of complexity which can exist in a local region.

    Death in the Sky: M31 Shreds its Satellites | Universe Today 2010

  • If it works – even on a rudimentary level – Hameroff will be vindicated, and it won't matter at all that nobody knows what the extremal is.

    Continuation… 2008

  • They calculated the entropy of black holes with electric charge, and in particular of extremal black holes — configurations where all of the energy really comes from the electric field itself, none from any purported mass that might have fallen into the black hole.

    Where Does the Entropy Go? Sean 2009

  • We suggest that the unusual nature of this limit may help in understanding the entropy of extremal black holes.

    Where Does the Entropy Go? Sean 2009

  • The best argument against it is the kind of microstate counting from string theory pioneered by Strominger and Vafa — they were always looking precisely at the extremal case, and found a non-zero entropy.

    Where Does the Entropy Go? Sean 2009

  • Perhaps the states disappear into Whoville, rather than really describing an extremal black hole.

    Where Does the Entropy Go? Sean 2009

  • In other words, the approach to extremality is not continuous, as the non-extremal Reissner-Nordström solution splits into two spacetimes at extremality: an extremal black hole and a disconnected $AdS$ space.

    Where Does the Entropy Go? Sean 2009

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