Characteristic

A characteristic is a distinguishing feature of a person or thing. It may refer to:

Computing

Characteristic (biased exponent), an ambiguous term formerly used by some authors to specify some type of exponent of a floating point number
Characteristic (significand), an ambiguous term formerly used by some authors to specify the significand of a floating point number

I–V or current–voltage characteristic, the current in a circuit as a function of the applied voltage
Receiver operating characteristic

Characteristic (algebra) of a ring, the smallest common cycle length of the ring's addition operation
Characteristic (logarithm), integer part of a common logarithm
Characteristic function, usually the indicator function of a subset, though the term has other meanings in specific domains
Characteristic polynomial, a polynomial associated with a square matrix in linear algebra
Characteristic subgroup, a subgroup that is invariant under all automorphisms in group theory
Characteristic value, another name for the eigenvalue of a matrix
Characteristic vector (disambiguation), another name for eigenvector of a matrix
Characteristic word, a subclass of Sturmian word
Euler characteristic, a topological invariant
Method of characteristics, a technique for solving partial differential equations