Compass plant or rosinweed, large, coarse North American perennial herb (Silphium laciniatum) of the family Asteraceae (aster family), found chiefly in open grasslands. The deeply cut leaves t...

Gunter, Edmund, 1581–1626, English mathematician and astronomer, educated at Westminster School, London, and Christ Church, Oxford. He invented (1618) a small portable quadrant and discovered ...

Geometric problems of antiquity, three famous problems involving elementary geometric constructions with straight edge and compass, conjectured by the ancient Greeks to be impossible but not p...

Orientation, in architecture, the disposition of the parts of a building with reference to the points of the compass. From remote antiquity the traditional belief in the efficacy of religious ...

Wied, Gustav, 1858–1914, Danish novelist, playwright, and short-story writer. Wied was celebrated as a humorist. His vision of humanity was cynical and bitter, reflected in his writing by an a...

Celesta, keyboard musical instrument patented in 1886 by Auguste Mustel of Paris. It consists of a set of steel bars fastened over wood resonators and struck by hammers operated from the keybo...

Paganini, Niccolò, 1782–1840, Italian violinist, whose virtuosity became a legend. He extended the compass of the violin by his use of harmonics, perfected the use of double and triple stops, ...

Pyramid. The true pyramid exists only in Egypt, though the term has also been applied to similar structures in other countries. Egyptian pyramids are square in plan and their triangular sides,...

Wind, flow of air relative to the earth's surface. A wind is named according to the point of the compass from which it blows, e.g., a wind blowing from the north is a north wind. The direction...

Polygon, closed plane figure bounded by straight line segments as sides. A polygon is convex if any two points inside the polygon can be connected by a line segment that does not intersect any...