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Structure - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Structure is a fundamental, tangible or intangible notion referring to the recognition,observation, nature, and permanence of patterns and relationships of entities. This notion may itself be an object, such as a built structure, or an attribute, such as the structure of society. From a child's verbal description of a snowflake, to the detailed scientific analysis of the properties of magnetic fields, the concept of structure is now often an essential foundation of nearly every mode of inquiry and discovery in science, philosophy, and art.[1] In early 20th-century and earlier thought, form often plays a role comparable to that of structure in contemporary thought. The neoKantianism of Ernst Cassirer (cf. his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms , completed in 1929 and published in English translation in the 1950s) is sometimes regarded as a precursor of the later shift to structuralism and poststructuralism.[2] The description of structure implicitly offers an account of what a system is made of: a configuration of items, a collection of inter-related components or services. A structure may be a hierarchy (a cascade of one-to-many relationships), a network featuring many-to-manylinks, or a lattice featuring connections between components that are neighbors in space.
Contents [hide] 1 Types of structure 1.1 Physical structure 1.2 Biological structure 1.3 Chemical structure 1.4 Musical composition 1.5 Social structure 1.6 Data structure 2 See also 3 References

Types of structure
Physical structure

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In engineering and architecture, a structure is a body or assemblage of bodies in space to form a system capable of supporting loads. Physical structures include man-made and natural arrangements. Buildings, aircraft, soap films, skeletons, anthills, beaver dams and salt domes are all examples of physical structures. The effects of loads on physical structures are determined through structural analysis. Structural engineering refers to engineering of physical structures. Built structures are a subset of physical structures resulting from construction. These are divided into buildings and nonbuilding structures, and make up the infrastructure of a human society. Built structures are composed of structural elements such as columns, beams andtrusses. Built structures are broadly divided by their varying design approaches and standards, into categories including Building structures, Architectural structures, Civil engineering structures and Mechanical structures.

Biological structure

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Main article: Biological organisation In biology, structures exist at all levels of organization, ranging hierarchically from the atomicand molecular to the cellular, tissue, organ, organismic, population and ecosystem level. Usually, a higher-level structure is composed of multiple copies of a lower-level structure.

Chemical structure
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure

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10/21/13

Structure - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Main article: Chemical structure Chemistry is a science that treats matter at the atomic to macromolecular scalethe reactions, transformations, and aggregations of matter, and accompanying energy and entropy changes in these processes. Chemical structure refers to both molecular geometry and electronic structure. The structural formula of a chemical compound is a graphical representation of the molecular structure that shows how the atoms are arranged. A protein structure is the three dimensional coordinates of the atoms within (macro) molecules made of protein.

Musical composition

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Music is an art form consisting of sound and silence expressed through time. The termmusical form, a type of structure, refers to two related concepts: The type of composition (for example, a musical work can have the form of a symphony, a concerto, or other generic type) The structure of a particular piece (for example, a piece can be written in binary form, sonata form, as a fugue, etc.)

Social structure

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Main article: Social structure A social structure is a pattern of relationships. They are social organizations of individuals in various life situations. Structures are applicable to people in how a society is as a system organized by a characteristic pattern of relationships. This is known as the social organization of the group. Sociologists have studied the changing structure of these groups.Structure and agency are two confronted theories about human behaviour. The debate surrounding the influence of structure and agency on human thought is one of the central issues in sociology. In this context, agency refers to the individual human capacity to act independently and make free choices. Structure here refers to factors such as social class, religion, gender, ethnicity, customs etc. that seem to limit or influence individual opportunities.

Data structure

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Main article: Data structure In computer science, a data structure is a way of storing data in a computer so that it can be used efficiently. Often a carefully chosen data structure facilitates using the most efficientalgorithm. The choice of the data structure often begins from the choice of an abstract data type. A well-designed data structure supports a variety of critical operations using as few resources (execution time and memory space) as possible. Data structures are implemented in a programming language as data types and the references (e.g. relationships, links and pointers) and operations that are possible with them. For structure tables and structure functions, see data structure.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure

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