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Chirality and symmetry measures: a transdisciplinary review. (English) Zbl 1078.00503

Summary: Many quantitative measures of the degree of chirality or symmetry of a set have been proposed in the literature. The main approaches from various areas are reviewed: chemistry, physics, mathematics, computer sciences, biology, and psychophysics. Relations between chirality, symmetry, and other concepts such as similarity, disorder and entropy, are discussed.

MSC:

00A79 Physics
60E05 Probability distributions: general theory
62H05 Characterization and structure theory for multivariate probability distributions; copulas
92E10 Molecular structure (graph-theoretic methods, methods of differential topology, etc.)