subpower

English

Etymology

sub- +‎ power

Noun

subpower (plural subpowers)

1. A minor power; Something that has control over a limited domain that falls within the larger domain of a greater power.
   • 2000, Ronald H. Chilcote, Imperialism: Theoretical Directions, page 278:

     Brazilian subimperialism implies policy of being a subpower; but the subpower that Brazil practices does not give us the key to the subimperialist stage which it has entered.

   • 2013, Damiaan Kletter, The Revelation Code: What to Expect Through 2020, →ISBN, page 32:

     Three of the subpowers of evil in spirit, the three unclean spirits, appear in verse 16:13 and directly relate via their corresponding clock lines to the dragon, the beast, and the false prophet. The names of the remaining subpowers of evil are given in Revelation as follows: Wormwood, the second subpower of the false prophet; Apollyon and Abaddon, the two subpowers of the great whore; the minds of serpent and Magog, the two subpowers of the serpant; and finally Gog (also known as the names of blasphemy) and the scorpions of the earth, the two subpowers of the accuser of our brethren.

   • 2015, W. Joseph Campbell, 1995: The Year the Future Began, →ISBN, page 108:

     William Safire, a conservative columnist for the New York Times, wrote that Clinton would be “remembered in history as a man who feared, flinched and failed,” whose diffidence in the face of “Nazi-style ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia had “turned a superpower into a subpower."

2. (mathematics) A type of function such that for every exponent a, there is a small integer ε such that for any positive value x less than ε, its image lies between x^a and x^-a .
   • 2015, Jacek Kucab, Michael Zarichnyi, “Remarks on asymptotic power dimension”, in arXiv‎^[1]:

     Using a result of Dranishnikov and Smith we prove that, under some conditions, the asymptotic power dimension of a proper metric space coincides with the dimension of its subpower corona.

3. (mathematics) A natural number x, with the property that x = bⁱy for some y that is not multiple of b.