Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • adjective Mathematics Designating or specifying a mapping of a surface or region upon another surface so that all angles between intersecting curves remain unchanged.
  • adjective Of or relating to a map projection in which small areas are rendered with true shape.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Of the same form.
  • In mathematics, conserving angles or establishing infinitesimal similarity.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • adjective Describing something that conforms, especially that matches the shape of something.
  • adjective cartography Describing a map projection which has the property of preserving relative angles over small scales (except at a limited number of distinct points). On such map projections the scale depends only location but not direction. Also referred to as orthomorphic.

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Late Latin cōnfōrmālis, similar : Latin com-, com- + Latin fōrma, shape.]

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Examples

  • You argue that there are two difficulties with AdS/CFT: that strong forms of it are inconsistent with the bending of light by gravitational fields, and that the evidence supports a weaker relation that you call conformal induction.

    Guest Post: Joe Polchinski on Science or Sociology? Sean 2007

  • Mr. Penrose points out that, as one goes back toward the infinite energy density of the Big Bang, the geometry of the early universe could in some sense be called conformal.

    In the End Is the Beginning Peter Woit 2011

  • Penrose's cyclic cosmological model is a particular application of his conformal compactification construction, which takes any space-time, whether or not it contains singularities, and whether or not it is infinite in time or space, and constructs a finite (compactified) space-time with boundary, whose metric is related to the original metric of space-time by a locally variable scale factor & #937, called the conformal factor.

    Archive 2009-05-01 Gordon McCabe 2009

  • The corneas were coated in 250 nm of nickel using a technique developed at Penn State called conformal-evaporated-film-by-rotation.

    physicsworld.com: all content 2010

  • The Mercator is also a "conformal" map projection.

    peters world map jlundberg 2007

  • Despite the English way of not really asking questions much in seminars and the like (which drove me nuts when I was here, and still does now), I think that Durham offers the best all-round training for students or postdocs in theoretical high energy physics (either phenomenological or more formal, such as conformal field theory, integrable systems, strings) in the UK, and can give several places around the world a run for their money.

    Fortress of Solitude cjohnson 2005

  • I don’t want to comment further on this until I’ve done some more reading, but if you want to see a Penrose diagram (aka conformal diagram) of an evaporating black hole, there’s one on page 413 of Wald’s General Relativity.

    Arrow of Time FAQ Sean 2007

  • Researchers at Wake Forest University's Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials are working to create flexible, or "conformal," organic solar cells that can be wrapped around surfaces, rolled up or even painted onto structures.

    Nanotechbuzz 2010

  • The theories on the worldsheet must be conformal which is string theory's way to demand the spacetime equations of motion - the beta-functions are the equations of motion.

    The Reference Frame 2010

  • Researchers at Wake Forest University's Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials are working to create flexible, or "conformal," organic solar cells that can be wrapped around surfaces, rolled up or even painted onto structures.

    Nanotechbuzz 2010

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