"Fixed point" has many meanings in science, most of them mathematical.
- Fixed point (mathematics)
- Fixed-point iteration, a general method to compute the fixed point of an iterated function.
- Fixed-point combinator
- For "Fixed-point join" in databases, see Recursive join
- Fixed-point arithmetic, a manner of doing arithmetic on computers
- Benchmark (surveying), fixed points used by geodesists
- For “fixed points” in physics, see Renormalization group
- Fixed points are necessary for a watercraft to be moored to a quay.
- Archimedes said δῶς μοι πᾶ στῶ καὶ τὰν γᾶν κινάσω, which is sometimes translated as “Give me a fixed point and I will move the world.”
Famous quotes containing the words fixed and/or point:
“The foot of the heavenly ladder, which we have got to mount in order to reach the higher regions, has to be fixed firmly in every-day life, so that everybody may be able to climb up it along with us. When people then find that they have got climbed up higher and higher into a marvelous, magical world, they will feel that that realm, too, belongs to their ordinary, every-day life, and is, merely, the wonderful and most glorious part thereof.”
—E.T.A.W. (Ernst Theodor Amadeus Wilhelm)
“The point of the dragonfly’s terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork--for it doesn’t ... but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, finged tangle. Freedom is the world’s water and weather, the world’s nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz.”
—Annie Dillard (b. 1945)