this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2024
456 points (98.9% liked)

Science Memes

11148 readers
2448 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.



Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] superkret@feddit.org 55 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

If you want a clear definition, ask a mathematician:

A word is any written product of group elements and their inverses.

Or a computer scientist:

A word is a fixed-sized datum handled as a unit by the instruction set or the hardware of the processor.

[–] folekaule@lemmy.world 21 points 2 weeks ago
[–] circuitfarmer@lemmy.sdf.org 10 points 2 weeks ago

Maybe ironically, neither one would be appropriate as a linguistic definition.

[–] affiliate@lemmy.world 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

i wonder what the inverse of the letters in the english alphabet are. since it has a non-prime number of letters (26 to be exact), we know that some letters won’t have inverses. i wonder which letters don’t have inverses. i guess it would be pretty easy to find out if you use the standard alphabet ordering and then port the alphabet over to ℤ/26ℤ, but that’s not a particularly satisfying answer.

[–] Malgas@beehaw.org 3 points 2 weeks ago

Or, in either field (formal language theory bridges both) it can mean any string of symbols, letters, or tokens.