ideal
adjective
conforming to an ultimate standard of perfection or excellence; embodying an ideal
of or relating to the philosophical doctrine of the reality of ideas
noun
model of excellence or perfection of a kind; one having no equal
Origin
From French idéal, from Late Latin ideālis (“existing in idea”), by surface analysis, idea + -al, from Latin idea (“idea”); see idea. In mathematics, the noun ring theory sense was first introduced by German mathematician Richard Dedekind in his 1871 edition of a text on number theory. The concept was quickly expanded to ring theory and later generalised to order theory. The set theory and Lie theory senses can be regarded as applications of the order theory sense.
Phrases
- different ideal
- factor ideal
- fractional ideal
- Frink ideal
- ideal gas
- ideal gas law
- ideal lattice
- ideal mixture
- ideal number
- ideal point
- ideal polyhedron
- ideal solution
Related words
Word family
Pertaining to
WordNet 2.1 (Princeton University). Wiktionary (CC BY-SA). CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. WordNet 2.1 Copyright Princeton University. All rights reserved. Wiktionary content is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike Licence.