identity has definitions from the field of mathematics
1
[ noun ] the distinct personality of an individual regarded as a persisting entity

Examples

: "you can lose your identity when you join the army"

Used in print

(Max F. Millikan and Donald L. M. Blackmer,...)

National_leaders will have_to display the highest skills of statesmanship to guide their people through times of uncertainty and confusion which destroy men 's sense of identity .

(Joyce O. Hertzler, American Social Institutions;...)

As Yinger has pointed_out , the `` reliance on symbols , on tradition , on sacred_writings , on the cultivation of emotional feelings of identity and harmony with sacred values , turns one to the past far more than to the future '' .

(Clayton C. Barbeau, The Ikon....)

White 's suggestion flattered , but he did not like the identity .

(Robert Penn Warren, Wilderness....)

Or was he now taking the role - the gesture and the suffering - because it was the only way to affirm his history and identity in the torpid , befogged loneliness of this land .

2
[ noun ] collective aspect of the set of characteristics by which a thing is recognizable or known

Used in print

(Clement Greenberg, "Collage" in his Art and...)

It was because of this chain-reaction as_much_as for any other reason - that_is , because of the growing independence of the planar unit in collage as a shape - that the identity of depicted_objects , or at_least parts of them , re-emerged in Braque 's and Picasso 's papiers colles and continued to remain more conspicuous there - but only as flattened silhouettes - than in any of their paintings done wholly in oil before the end of 1913 .

Only when the collage had been exhaustively translated into oil , and transformed by this translation , did Cubism become an affair of positive color and flat , interlocking silhouettes whose legibility and placement created allusions to , if_not the illusion of , unmistakable three-dimensional identities .

Related terms

recognition name

3
[ noun ] (mathematics) an operator that leaves unchanged the element on which it operates

Examples

"the identity under numerical multiplication is 1"

Used in print

(Kenneth Hoffman and Ray Kunze, Linear Al...)

The projection * * f will be the identity on * * f and zero on the other * * f .

We shall find a polynomial * * f such_that * * f is the identity on * * f and is zero on the other * * f , and so that * * f , etc. .

Related terms

operator

4
[ noun ] exact sameness

Examples

"they shared an identity of interests"

Used in print

(William G. Pollard, Physicist and Christian....)

Every community , if it is alive has a spirit , and that spirit is the center of its unity and identity .

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