(Redirected from Regulars)
In ordinary English, '''regular''' is an adjective or noun used to mean in accordance with the usual customs, conventions, or rules, or frequent, periodic, or symmetric.
The term 'regular' also refers to:
★ In the
military, a 'regular' unit is a military unit that is part of the regular forces (not
militia or
military reserves). For example, the
US 101st Airborne Division is a regular unit, while the
1st US Army (Reserve) is not. See
Regular Army for usage in the
U.S. Army, and
Regular Force for usage in the
Canadian Forces.
★ A person who appears often at a certain location and may know others who are also there often, whether out of want or occupation. For example, a regular can be one who goes to a certain coffee shop everyday, so often that the employees know him or her.
★ Someone who
defecates roughly the same amount and at the same time every day.
★ In
Freemasonry,
'regularity' refers to the constitutional mechanism by which Grand Lodges or Grand Orients give one another mutual recognition.
★ In
conjugation, a '
regular verb' is a verb that inflects normally.
★ In the
Roman Catholic Church, 'regular clergy' are
clergy who belong to
religious orders (as opposed to "diocesan clergy").
Mathematical meanings include:
★ In
analysis, 'regularity' refers to the degree of differentiability or
smoothness of a function.
★ In
algebraic geometry, a function is regular on a
variety if for every point there exists an open neighborhood so that the function restricts to a rational function whose denominator does not vanish in that neighborhood.
★ In
computer science, particularly
formal language theory, a language is regular if it can be represented by a
regular expression.
★ In
geometry, a geometric figure is 'regular' if it is symmetric. See
regular polygon or
regular polyhedron.
★ In
graph theory, a '
regular graph' is a graph such that the all the degrees of the vertices are equal.
★ In
information theory, data with regularity has less
entropy than its representation suggests. For example,
English prose is quite regular because most random sequences of
alphabetic and
punctuative characters are not valid English prose.
★ In
linear algebra, a 'regular matrix' is an
invertible matrix.
★ In
set theory, a
regular cardinal is a
cardinal number that is equal to its
cofinality.
★ In
topology, a
regular space is one in which points are closed and any point can be separated by open sets from any closed set of which it is not a member.
See also
★
Irregular