Wort Poisson
Perhaps provoking more questions than meeting answers, here are the definitions for last week’s mystery words, as provided by this land’s eminent lexicon, the Macquarie 3rd Edition. And I quote:
imparipinnate: pinnate with a terminal leaflet
rupture wort: any of several small herbs of the genus Herniaria, as the glabrous rupture wort formerly used to cure ruptures
Poisson’s ratio: an elastic constant of a material, defined as the ratio of lateral strain to the longitudinal strain construed as a positive value.
Not to be muddled with Poisson’s distribution: a limiting form of the binomial probability distribution for small values of the probability of success and for large numbers of trials. It is particularly useful in industrial quality-control work and in radiation and bacteriological problems.
Both these last two honour their inventor, French maths whiz, Simeon Poisson. Either his ideas are too complex for simple English, or the Macquarie staff wanted to keep Simeon’s dark secrets hidden.
Can someone out there give us a lucid lay-definition for either the ratio OR the distribution named after Monsieur Poisson? Coz all I’m hearing is one big collective HUH across cyberspace…
Failing that, can you pinpoint a hapax legomenon. A what? Go on, I dare you. But don’t fret too long - this curious term will be lovingly explained next post.