From: Rick DeNatale <rick.denatale@...>
Date: 2006-08-12T00:20:46+09:00
Subject: Re: Defining Eigenclass

On 8/11/06, Trans <transfire@gmail.com> wrote:
> Google Singleton class. That'll surely help ;-)

The 'official' ruby docs talk about singleton classes, but eigenclass
seems to have been proposed by someone, somewhere, sometime as an
alternative.

This seems to be confined to the ruby community and provides the
subtext for things like eigenclass.org, but I can't seem to find where
the term came from originally.

I'd love enlightenment on that.

Now I guess that the etymology comes from the German word "eigen"
which can be translated to "own" or "individual", and also forms the
root of the mathematical terms "eigenvector" and "eigenvalue".  If we
look at "eigenclass" from the perspective of "eigenvector" though, it
doesn't fit that well, since an "eigenvector" of a transformation in
linear algebra is a vector which is unchanged in direction (or more
properly only changes by being multiplied by a scalar) under that
transformation.


-- 
Rick DeNatale

http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/