"The Geometry of Love" is a study of a building, accreting through time, a coral reef of memories and desires; the book meditates on the interaction of architecture and prayer, and on the symbiosis of edifice and ritual that has given faith its characteristic symbols through history.
"It's a very characteristic Dutch symbol," Dr. Zafran said.
Among the eight columns of hieroglyphics, Mr. Tokeley-Parry recognized the cartouche -- a characteristic oblong symbol -- of Psamtik I, a pharaoh of the 26th Dynasty, whose reign began around 660 B.C. Objects from that period, a time of great artistic flowering, were much prized by collectors.
The five are almost identically represented in art, all dressed in monastic garments, seated with folded legs, with the same hairdress and long-lobed ears, but are distinguished by characteristic colours, symbols, poses of hands, and the directions they face.
Furthermore, the basic geometry characteristic surface symbols and database were established.
Another layer of specific cultural heritage is added by characteristic local symbols found engraved on local houses.
And the abstraction of natural forms into rudimentary symbols, characteristic of modern painting, is echoed in the "pin-men" conventions of Magdalenian caves, in Aztec pictograms, and Indian and Tibetan cosmic-diagram paintings.
Pictures are distinguished from symbols of other sorts in virtue of the distinguishing characteristics of pictorial symbol systems.
Interestingly, these terrorist leaders share certain physical characteristics as a symbol of their authority.
For a fixed number k of information symbols, the performance of the Raptor code can be described using three characteristics, the input symbol's erasure probability, the probability of a successful decoding, and the required code rate k/n to achieve target reliability for the given erasure probability.
The more interesting question concerned the impact of symbol characteristics.
