GIKI Test key terms

The relationship stating that voltage across a conductor equals current through it multiplied by its resistance, written V = IR, valid for linear resistive elements at constant temperature.

A conservation principle stating that the algebraic sum of all voltages around any closed loop in a circuit equals zero, used to write loop equations for network analysis.

A conservation principle stating that the total current entering a circuit node equals the total current leaving it, since charge cannot accumulate at an ideal junction.

A network theorem showing that any linear two-terminal circuit can be replaced by a single voltage source in series with a single resistance, simplifying load calculations.

The dual of Thevenin's theorem: any linear two-terminal network can be replaced by a current source in parallel with a resistance, with the source equal to the short-circuit current.

The total opposition a circuit presents to alternating current, combining resistance and reactance as a complex quantity measured in ohms and expressed with magnitude and phase.

The ratio of real power to apparent power in an AC circuit, equal to the cosine of the phase angle between voltage and current, ranging from zero to one.

The ratio of primary to secondary winding turns, which determines the step-up or step-down voltage relationship and the inverse current relationship in an ideal transformer.

A description of how an algorithm's running time grows as input size increases, ignoring constants, commonly expressed with Big-O, Big-Omega, and Big-Theta notation.

A data structure mapping keys to values through a hash function, offering average constant-time insertion and lookup but requiring collision resolution and occasional resizing.

A binary tree where every node's left subtree holds smaller keys and its right subtree holds larger keys, enabling ordered search in logarithmic time when balanced.

Systematic visiting of all vertices in a graph, typically by breadth-first search using a queue or depth-first search using a stack or recursion, forming the basis of many algorithms.

An algorithm design technique that solves overlapping subproblems once, stores their results in a table, and builds up the final answer from those stored subproblem solutions.

A programming technique where a function calls itself on smaller inputs, requiring a base case to terminate and consuming call-stack memory proportional to recursion depth.

The process of organizing relational database tables to reduce redundancy and update anomalies by decomposing them according to functional dependencies, typically into third normal form.

Four guarantees for reliable database transactions: atomicity (all or nothing), consistency (valid state transitions), isolation (concurrent transactions do not interfere), and durability (committed changes survive failure).

A column or set of columns that uniquely identifies each row in a relational table and cannot contain null values, often enforced with a unique index.

A plot of applied stress against resulting strain for a material, revealing its elastic region, yield point, ultimate tensile strength, and fracture behavior under loading.

The slope of the linear elastic portion of a stress-strain curve, measuring a material's stiffness as the ratio of tensile stress to tensile strain.

The negative ratio of lateral strain to axial strain when a material is stretched or compressed, typically between 0.2 and 0.5 for common engineering solids.

The stress at which a material begins to deform permanently, marking the transition from elastic to plastic behavior and a key design limit for structural components.

The principle that the total entropy of an isolated system never decreases, implying that heat flows spontaneously from hot to cold and that no engine converts heat entirely into work.

The maximum theoretical efficiency of a heat engine operating between two reservoirs, equal to one minus the ratio of cold to hot absolute temperatures.

The ideal thermodynamic cycle modeling steam power plants, comprising pump, boiler, turbine, and condenser processes, with efficiency improved by superheating and regeneration.

A dimensionless ratio of inertial to viscous forces in fluid flow, used to predict whether flow is laminar, transitional, or turbulent in a given geometry.

A statement of energy conservation along a streamline in steady, incompressible, inviscid flow, relating pressure, velocity, and elevation head at two points.

The thin region near a solid surface where fluid velocity rises from zero at the wall to the free-stream value, dominating skin friction and convective heat transfer.

The regular three-dimensional arrangement of atoms or ions in a crystalline solid, described by a repeating unit cell and characterized by Miller indices for its planes.

A line defect in a crystal lattice whose motion allows plastic deformation at stresses far below the theoretical shear strength of a perfect crystal.

A graphical map showing which phases of a material system are stable at equilibrium as functions of temperature, composition, and sometimes pressure, including solubility limits and eutectic points.

A heat treatment that heats a metal and cools it slowly to soften it, relieve internal stresses, and restore ductility by allowing recovery, recrystallization, and grain growth.

Progressive fracture of a material under repeated or fluctuating stress below its yield strength, typically initiating at surface defects and growing into a final brittle fracture.

The rule that a system at equilibrium shifts to counteract an imposed change in concentration, pressure, or temperature, predicting how reaction yields respond to altered conditions.

The minimum energy that reacting molecules must possess to form products, determining the temperature dependence of reaction rate through the Arrhenius equation.

An equation expressing reaction rate as a function of reactant concentrations raised to experimentally determined powers, whose sum gives the overall reaction order.

A relation converting the rate of change of an extensive property within a control volume into local storage plus net flux across its boundary, foundational in conservation derivations.

The internal moment at a cross-section of a beam that resists external loads, whose diagram along the span is used to design section size and reinforcement.

The internal transverse force at a beam section equal to the algebraic sum of external loads on one side, whose diagram gives the slope of the bending moment diagram.

A geometric property of a cross-section measuring its resistance to bending about an axis, equal to the integral of area elements times squared distance from that axis.

The effective length of a compression member divided by its least radius of gyration, governing whether it fails by yielding or by buckling.

The sum of a project's future cash flows discounted to today at a required rate, minus the initial investment; a positive value suggests the project adds value.

The discount rate at which a project's net present value equals zero, representing its expected annualized return and compared against a hurdle rate in capital budgeting.

A method finding the sales volume at which total revenue equals total cost, separating fixed and variable costs to determine the minimum output for profitability.

The instantaneous rate of change of a function with respect to a variable, defined as the limit of a difference quotient and used to find slopes and extrema.

The accumulated sum of a function over an interval, interpreted as signed area under a curve and computed as the antiderivative evaluated at the limits.

The derivative of a multivariable function with respect to one variable while holding all others constant, used to find gradients and optimize engineering systems.

A scalar by which a nonzero vector is scaled when a linear transformation is applied; found by solving the characteristic equation of a matrix.

An iterative optimization method that repeatedly moves parameters in the direction of the negative gradient of a loss function to reduce error toward a local minimum.

An algorithm that computes gradients of a loss function with respect to network weights using the chain rule, propagating errors backward through each layer.

A model's tendency to memorize training data including noise, producing low training error but poor generalization to unseen data; countered by regularization, dropout, and more data.

A resampling technique that partitions data into folds, training on some and validating on others in turn, to estimate generalization performance more reliably.

The tension between a model too simple to capture patterns (high bias) and one too flexible and noise-sensitive (high variance), balanced to minimize total expected error.

A deep network using learnable filter kernels that slide over input grids to extract local spatial features, sharing weights to reduce parameters for image and signal tasks.