26 lines
1.4 KiB
Markdown
26 lines
1.4 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: "Degrees of freedom"
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chunk: 1/1
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source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrees_of_freedom"
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category: "reference"
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tags: "science, encyclopedia"
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date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:52:37.551658+00:00"
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instance: "kb-cron"
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---
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In many scientific fields, the degrees of freedom of a system is the number of parameters of the system that may vary independently. For example, a point in the plane has two degrees of freedom for translation: its two coordinates; a non-infinitesimal object on the plane might have additional degrees of freedoms related to its orientation.
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In mathematics, this notion is formalized as the dimension of a manifold or an algebraic variety. When degrees of freedom is used instead of dimension, this usually means that the manifold or variety that models the system is only implicitly defined.
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See:
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Degrees of freedom (mechanics), number of independent motions that are allowed to the body or, in case of a mechanism made of several bodies, number of possible independent relative motions between the pieces of the mechanism
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Degrees of freedom (physics and chemistry), a term used in explaining dependence on parameters, or the dimensions of a phase space
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Degrees of freedom (statistics), the number of values in the final calculation of a statistic that are free to vary
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Degrees of freedom problem, the problem of controlling motor movement given abundant degrees of freedom
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== See also ==
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Six degrees of freedom
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== References == |