(sociology) a term created by C. Wright Mills to describe sociological work that has a high focus on empirical methodology, particularly work that fixated with survey methods and their quantifiability.

(harmonic analysis, representation theory, topology) A branch of harmonic analysis dealing with generalised Fourier transforms that act on functions defined on Hausdorff locally compact topological groups.

(software, object-oriented programming) A creational design pattern that decouples the object creation by providing a group of individual factories by defining an abstract factory class.

(software, object-oriented programming) A class that has an abstract method to create an object.

plural of abstract factory pattern

(programming) A data type defined only by data properties and operations to be performed on the data without any specification as to how the data will be represented or the operations performed.

plural of abstract factory class

plural of abstract data type

(mathematics, number theory) A branch of number theory in which suitable ideas and techniques from analytic number theory are generalised and applied to a variety of mathematical fields.

(obsolete) Obtained from plants by distillation.