Canonical

The word canonical is used to indicate a particular choice from of a number of possible conventions. This convention allows a mathematical object or class of objects to be uniquely identified or standardized.

For example, the right-hand rule for the cross product is a convention, which corresponds to the canonical vector space orientation in R^3. Similarly, canonical labeling provides a way to uniquely label a graph so that isomorphism checking is reduced to comparing canonical labelings of two graphs.

See also

Canonical Brick, Canonical Bundle, Canonical Labeling, Canonical Map, Jordan Block, Rational Canonical Form, Symplectic Diffeomorphism

Portions of this entry contributed by Todd Rowland

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References

Derbyshire, J. Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics. New York: Penguin, p. 40, 2004.

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Canonical

Cite this as:

Rowland, Todd and Weisstein, Eric W. "Canonical." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Resource. https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Canonical.html

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