Complement

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In many different fields, the complement of X is something that together with X makes a complete whole, something that supplies what X lacks.

• In painting and optics, complement refers to complementary colors.
• The complement system is a group of proteins found in blood serum which act in concert with antibodies to achieve the destruction of non-self particles such as foreign blood cells or bacteria.
• In mathematics, complement has several meanings. See complement (mathematics) for an extensive list.
• In traditional music theory a complement (music) is the interval added to another, that is placed on top of another, so that their complete span is an octave, while in musical set theory the complement of a pitch class set are those pitches not included (the pitches needed to form an aggregate).
• In economics, a complement good is a good often consumed together with the good in question.
• phonetic complement
• complementarity (molecular biology) and complementary DNA
• complementary experiments (physics)
• complement (linguistics) is a word or phrase having a particular syntactic role.
• In computational complexity theory, decision problems and complexity classes have complements; see complement (complexity).
• In computer science, the method of complements is an arithmetic operation useful in addition and subtraction; complement also might refer to the representation of negative values as in one's complement or two's complement.
• In nautical terms, a complement is the number of persons in a ship's full company, counting both officers and crew.