sieve
Definition from Wiktionary, the free dictionary
Contents
English[edit]
Etymology[edit]
From Old English sife, Proto-Germanic *sibi. Akin to German Sieb, Dutch zeef, Slavic *sito (Russian сито (sito), сев (sev), сеять (sejatʹ)).
Pronunciation[edit]
Noun[edit]
sieve (plural sieves)
- A device to separate, in a granular material, larger particles from smaller ones, or to separate solid objects from a liquid.
- Use the sieve to get the pasta from the water.
- A process, physical or abstract, that arrives at a final result by filtering out unwanted pieces of input from a larger starting set of input.
- 2010, Luke Mastin, “20TH CENTURY MATHEMATICS - ROBINSON AND MATIYASEVICH”, www.storyofmathematics.com, accessed on 2013-09-08:
- Among, [sic] his other achievements, Matiyasevich and his colleague Boris Stechkin also developed an interesting “visual sieve” for prime numbers, which effectively “crosses out” all the composite numbers, leaving only the primes.
- Given a list of consecutive numbers starting at 1, the Sieve of Eratosthenes algorithm will find all of the prime numbers.
- 2010, Luke Mastin, “20TH CENTURY MATHEMATICS - ROBINSON AND MATIYASEVICH”, www.storyofmathematics.com, accessed on 2013-09-08:
- (obsolete) A kind of coarse basket.
- (Can we find and add a quotation of Simmonds to this entry?)
Derived terms[edit]
Translations[edit]
device to separate larger objects
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process that filters out unwanted pieces of input
Verb[edit]
sieve (third-person singular simple present sieves, present participle sieving, simple past and past participle sieved)
Translations[edit]
to strain, sift or sort using a sieve
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