An epitome (Greek epitemnein—to cut short) is a summary or miniature form, also used as a synonym for embodiment. Look up Synonym in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ... Embodiment is the way in which human (or any other animals) psychology arises from the brains and bodys physiology. ...

Many lost documents from the Ancient Greek and Roman worlds survive now only "in epitome" referring to the practice of some later authors (epitomators) who wrote distilled versions of larger works now lost. Some writers attempted to convey the stance and spirit of the original, while others added further details or anecdotes regarding the general subject. As with all secondary historical sources, a different bias not present in the original may creep in. Note: This article contains special characters. ... The Roman Forum was the central area around which ancient Rome developed. ... A bias is a prejudice in a general or specific sense, usually in the sense for having a preference to one particular point of view or ideological perspective. ...

Documents surviving in epitome differ from those surviving only as fragments quoted in later works, and those used as unacknowledged sources by later scholars, as they can stand as discrete documents, albeit refracted through the views of another author.

Examples of epitomes providing the only record of now lost works include:

• John Xiphilinus' precis of the missing portions of Cassius Dio's History of Rome.
• Justin's abridged version of the Philippic History by Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus, one of the main sources for the life of Alexander the Great.
• the epitome of Book IV of Apollodorus of Athens' Bibliotheke or Library, a comprehensive encyclopedia of Greek mythology.

Joannes Xiphilinus, epitomator of Dio Cassius, lived at Constantinople during the latter half of the 11th century AD. He was a monk and the nephew of the patriarch of Constantinople of the same name, a well-known preacher (Migne, Patrologia Graeca, cxx. ... Dio Cassius Cocceianus (155–after 229), known in English as Dio Cassius or Cassius Dio, was a noted Roman historian and public servant. ... Justin or Marcus Junianus Justinus or Justinus Frontinus, 3rd century Roman historian. ... Gnaeus Pompeius Trogus, 1st century BC Roman historian, of the Celtic tribe of the Vocontii in Gallia Narbonensis, flourished during the age of Augustus, nearly contemporary with Livy. ... Alexander the Great (Greek: [1], Megas Alexandros; July 356 BC — June 11, 323 BC), also known as Alexander III, king of Macedon (336–323 BC), was one of the most successful military commanders in history, conquering most of the known world before his death; he is frequently included in a... Apollodorus of Athens (born c. ... The Bibliotheke was renowned as the chief work of Greek historian and scholar. ... Brockhaus Konversations-Lexikon, 1902 An encyclopedia or encyclopaedia, also (rarely) encyclopædia,[1] is a comprehensive written compendium that contains information on all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge. ... // Greek mythology consists in part of a large collection of narratives that explain the origins of the world and detail the lives and adventures of a wide variety of gods, goddesses, heroes, and heroines. ...

Computing

In computing, an epitome is a condensed digital representation of ordered datasets, such as matrices representing images, audio signals, videos, or genetic sequences. Although much smaller than the epitomized data, the epitome contains many of the smaller overlapping parts of the data with much less repetition and with some level of generalization. As such, it can be used for data mining and other machine learning and signal processing tasks. The first epitomic analysis was performed on image textures (http://www.research.microsoft.com/~jojic/epitome.html) and was used for image parsing. The epitome model has also been applied to videos (http://www.psi.toronto.edu/~vincent/videoepitome.html). Filling in missing parts of a video, removing objects from a scene and performing video super-resolution are examples of tasks in which the video epitome has proven useful. Epitomes are also being investigated as tools for rational vaccine design. Originally, the word computing was synonymous with counting and calculating, and a science and technology that deals with the original sense of computing mathematical calculations. ... In statistics, a data set is a set of data consisting of: a list of research subjects and the data vector associated with each. ... A DNA sequence (sometimes genetic sequence) is a succession of letters representing the primary structure of a real or hypothetical DNA molecule or strand, The possible letters are A, C, G, and T, representing the four nucleotide subunits of a DNA strand (adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine), and typically these are...

External links

Computational Epitomes

• Image Epitome Nebojsa Jojic's image epitome website.
• Video Epitome Vincent Cheung's video epitome website.