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a bézier curve ( ) is a parametric curve used in computer graphics and related fields. a set of discrete "control points" defines a smooth, continuous curve by means of a formula. usually the curve is intended to approximate a real-world shape that otherwise has no mathematical representation or whose representation is...
in mathematics, especially functional analysis, a banach algebra, named after stefan banach, is an associative algebra over the real or complex numbers (or over a non-archimedean complete normed field) that at the same time is also a banach space, that is, a normed space that is complete in the metric induced by the no...
boris leonidovich pasternak (; ; 30 may 1960) was a russian poet, novelist, composer, and literary translator. composed in 1917, pasternak's first book of poems, my sister, life, was published in berlin in 1922 and soon became an important collection in the russian language. pasternak's translations of stage plays by g...
in mathematics, the binomial coefficients are the positive integers that occur as coefficients in the binomial theorem. commonly, a binomial coefficient is indexed by a pair of integers and is written it is the coefficient of the term in the polynomial expansion of the binomial power ; this coefficient can be computed ...
bill holbrook (born 1958) is an american cartoonist and webcomic writer and artist, best known for his syndicated comic strip on the fastrack. born in los angeles, holbrook grew up in huntsville, alabama, and began drawing at an early age. while majoring in illustration and visual design at auburn university, holbrook ...
bruce lorne campbell (born june 22, 1958) is an american actor and moviemaker. he is known best for his role as ash williams in sam raimi's evil dead horror series, beginning with the short movie within the woods (1978). he has also featured in many low-budget cult movies such as crimewave (1985), maniac cop (1988), su...
baron aberdare, of duffryn in the county of glamorgan, is a title in the peerage of the united kingdom. it was created on 23 august 1873 for the liberal politician henry bruce. he served as home secretary from 1868 to 1873. his grandson, the third baron, was a soldier, cricketer and tennis player and a member of the in...
a boy band is loosely defined as a vocal group consisting of young male singers, usually in their teenage years or in their twenties at the time of formation. generally, boy bands perform love songs marketed towards girls and young women. many boy bands dance as well as sing, usually giving highly choreographed perform...
in computer science, a b-tree is a self-balancing tree data structure that maintains sorted data and allows searches, sequential access, insertions, and deletions in logarithmic time. the b-tree generalizes the binary search tree, allowing for nodes with more than two children. unlike other self-balancing binary search...
the british museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the bloomsbury area of london. its permanent collection of eight million works is the largest in the world. it documents the story of human culture from its beginnings to the present. the british museum was the first public nat...
in elementary algebra, the binomial theorem (or binomial expansion) describes the algebraic expansion of powers of a binomial. according to the theorem, it is possible to expand the polynomial into a sum involving terms of the form , where the exponents and are nonnegative integers with , and the coefficient of each te...
balboa may refer to: boats balboa 16, an american sailboat design balboa 20, an american sailboat design balboa 21, an american sailboat design balboa 22, an american sailboat design balboa 23, an american sailboat design balboa 24, an american sailboat design places balboa, cauca, a town and municipality in colombia b...
boxing day is a holiday celebrated after christmas day, occurring on the second day of christmastide (26 december). though it originated as a holiday to give gifts to poor people, today, boxing day forms part of christmas celebrations, with many people choosing to take advantage of boxing day sales. it originated in gr...
balochistan (; ; , ) is a province of pakistan. located in the southwestern region of the country, balochistan is the largest province of pakistan by land area but is the least populated one. it is bordered by the pakistani provinces of khyber pakhtunkhwa to the north-east, punjab to the east and sindh to the south-eas...
william magear tweed (april 3, 1823 – april 12, 1878), often erroneously referred to as william "marcy" tweed (see below), and widely known as "boss" tweed, was an american politician most notable for being the political boss of tammany hall, the democratic party's political machine that played a major role in the poli...
balsall heath is an inner-city area of birmingham, west midlands, england. it has a diverse cultural mix of people and is the location of the balti triangle. history the name is first found as bordeshale in 1275, which is derived from the old english words bord's healh meaning 'bord's heath' or 'bord's nook' implying a...
bunge & born was a multinational corporation based in buenos aires, argentina, whose diverse interests included food processing and international trade in grains and oilseeds. it is now known as bunge limited. history bunge & born was founded in 1884 by ernesto bunge, a german argentine whose uncle, carl bunge, had bee...
"the big apple" is a nickname for new york city. it was first popularized in the 1920s by john j. fitz gerald, a sportswriter for the new york morning telegraph. its popularity since the 1970s is due in part to a promotional campaign by the new york tourist authorities. origin although the history of big apple was once...
sergeant thomas h. "boston" corbett (january 29, 1832 – presumed dead ) was an english-born american soldier and milliner who shot and killed john wilkes booth, the man who committed the assassination of abraham lincoln. corbett was initially arrested for disobeying orders, but was later released on the orders of secre...
the berber languages, also known as the amazigh languages or tamazight, are a branch of the afroasiatic language family. they comprise a group of closely related but mostly mutually unintelligible languages spoken by berber communities, who are indigenous to north africa. the languages are primarily spoken and not typi...
bankruptcy is a legal process through which people or other entities who cannot repay debts to creditors may seek relief from some or all of their debts. in most jurisdictions, bankruptcy is imposed by a court order, often initiated by the debtor. bankrupt is not the only legal status that an insolvent person may have,...
blissymbols or blissymbolics is a constructed language conceived as an ideographic writing system called semantography consisting of several hundred basic symbols, each representing a concept, which can be composed together to generate new symbols that represent new concepts. blissymbols differ from most of the world's...
bessel functions, first defined by the mathematician daniel bernoulli and then generalized by friedrich bessel, are canonical solutions of bessel's differential equation for an arbitrary complex number , which represents the order of the bessel function. although and produce the same differential equation, it is conven...
backpacking may refer to: backpacking (travel), low-cost, independent, international travel backpacking (hiking), trekking and camping overnight in the wilderness ultralight backpacking, a style of wilderness backpacking with an emphasis on carrying as little as possible see also hiking backpacking with animals, using ...
brahui ( ; ; also known as brahvi or brohi) is a dravidian language spoken by some of the brahui people. the language is spoken primarily in the central part of the balochistan province of pakistan, with smaller communities of speakers scattered in parts of iranian baluchestan, afghanistan, and turkmenistan (around mer...
berkeley db (bdb) is an unmaintained embedded database software library for key/value data, historically significant in open source software. berkeley db is written in c with api bindings for many other programming languages. bdb stores arbitrary key/data pairs as byte arrays, and supports multiple data items for a sin...
in logic and computer science, the boolean satisfiability problem (sometimes called propositional satisfiability problem and abbreviated satisfiability, sat or b-sat) is the problem of determining if there exists an interpretation that satisfies a given boolean formula. in other words, it asks whether the variables of ...
bob jones university (bju) is a private evangelical university in greenville, south carolina. it is known for its conservative cultural and religious positions. the university, with approximately 3,000 students, is accredited by the southern association of colleges and schools commission on colleges (sacscoc) and the t...
the british empire comprised the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates, and other territories ruled or administered by the united kingdom and its predecessor states. it began with the overseas possessions and trading posts established by england in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. at its height in the 19t...
batman is a 1989 superhero film based on the dc comics character of the same name, created by bob kane and bill finger. directed by tim burton, it is the first installment of warner bros.' initial batman film series. the film was produced by jon peters and peter guber and stars jack nicholson, michael keaton, kim basin...
batman (also known as batman: the movie) is a 1966 american superhero film directed by leslie h. martinson. based on the television series, and the first full-length theatrical adaptation of the dc comics character of the same name, the film stars adam west as batman and burt ward as robin. the film hit theaters two mo...
batman returns is a 1992 american superhero film directed by tim burton and written by daniel waters. based on the dc comics character batman, it is the sequel to batman (1989) and the second installment in the 1989–1997 batman series. in the film, the superhero vigilante batman comes into conflict with wealthy industr...
batman & robin is a 1997 american superhero film based on the dc comics characters batman and robin by bill finger and bob kane. it is the fourth and final installment of warner bros.'s initial batman film series, a sequel to batman forever and the only film in the series made without the involvement of tim burton in a...
batman forever is a 1995 american superhero film directed by joel schumacher and produced by tim burton, based on the dc comics character batman by bob kane and bill finger. the third installment of warner bros.' initial batman film series, it is a stand-alone sequel to batman returns starring val kilmer, replacing mic...
batman: year one is an american comic book story arc written by frank miller and illustrated by david mazzucchelli. year one was originally published by dc comics in batman #404–407 in 1987. there have been several reprints of the story: a hardcover, multiple trade paperbacks, several deluxe editions in hardcover and p...
a bidirectional text contains two text directionalities, right-to-left (rtl) and left-to-right (ltr). it generally involves text containing different types of alphabets, but may also refer to boustrophedon, which is changing text direction in each row. many computer programs fail to display bidirectional text correctly...
in mathematics, bernoulli's inequality (named after jacob bernoulli) is an inequality that approximates exponentiations of . it is often employed in real analysis. it has several useful variants: integer exponent case 1: for every integer and real number . the inequality is strict if and . case 2: for every integer and...
the benjamin franklin-class submarine''' was a group of us ballistic missile submarines that were in navy service from the 1960s–2000s. the class was an evolutionary development from the earlier of fleet ballistic missile submarine. having quieter machinery and other improvements, it is considered a separate class. a s...
the bastard operator from hell (bofh) is a fictional rogue computer operator created by simon travaglia, who takes out his anger on users (who are "lusers" to him) and others who pester him with their computer problems, uses his expertise against his enemies and manipulates his employer. several people have written sto...
walter brown "brownie" mcghee (november 30, 1915 – february 16, 1996) was an american folk and piedmont blues singer and guitarist, best known for his collaboration with the harmonica player sonny terry. life and career mcghee was born in knoxville, tennessee, and grew up in kingsport, tennessee. at about the age of fo...
the international bureau of weights and measures (, bipm) is an intergovernmental organisation, through which its 59 member-states act on measurement standards in four areas: chemistry, ionising radiation, physical metrology, as well as coordinated universal time. it is based in saint-cloud, near paris, france. the org...
bayonne (; ; ; ) is a city in southwestern france near the spanish border. it is a commune and one of two subprefectures in the pyrénées-atlantiques department, in the nouvelle-aquitaine region. bayonne is located at the confluence of the nive and adour rivers in the northern part of the cultural region of the basque c...
is a 1987 to 1991 cyberpunk original video animation (ova) series produced by youmex and animated by aic and artmic. the series was planned to run for 13 episodes, but was cut short to just 8. the series involves the adventures of the knight sabers, an all-female group of mercenaries who don powered exoskeletons and fi...
black is a racialized classification of people, usually a political and skin color-based category for specific populations with a mid- to dark brown complexion. not all people considered "black" have dark skin; in certain countries, often in socially based systems of racial classification in the western world, the term...
plague is an infectious disease caused by the bacterium yersinia pestis. symptoms include fever, weakness and headache. usually this begins one to seven days after exposure. there are three forms of plague, each affecting a different part of the body and causing associated symptoms. pneumonic plague infects the lungs, ...
the baudot code () is an early character encoding for telegraphy invented by émile baudot in the 1870s. it was the predecessor to the international telegraph alphabet no. 2 (ita2), the most common teleprinter code in use before ascii. each character in the alphabet is represented by a series of five bits, sent over a c...
blu tack is a reusable putty-like pressure-sensitive adhesive produced by bostik, commonly used to attach lightweight objects (such as posters or sheets of paper) to walls, doors or other dry surfaces. traditionally blue, it is also available in other colours. generic versions of the product are also available from oth...
bacillus (latin "stick") is a genus of gram-positive, rod-shaped bacteria, a member of the phylum bacillota, with 266 named species. the term is also used to describe the shape (rod) of other so-shaped bacteria; and the plural bacilli is the name of the class of bacteria to which this genus belongs. bacillus species ca...
brasília (; ) is the federal capital of brazil and seat of government of the federal district. the city is located high in the brazilian highlands in the country's central-west region. it was founded by president juscelino kubitschek on 21 april 1960, to serve as the new national capital. brasília is estimated to be br...
the de havilland propellers blue streak was a british intermediate-range ballistic missile (irbm), and later the first stage of the europa satellite launch vehicle. blue streak was cancelled without entering full production. the project was intended to maintain an independent british nuclear deterrent, replacing the v ...