APOTOME

(Yunanca köken — orijinale bakınız.) In Music, the remaining part of an entire tone, after a major semitone has been abstracted from it; or it is the remainder of a whole tone when diminished by a limma, or smaller semitone. As the tone major cannot be rationally divided into two equal parts, the Greeks divided it into a greater and le semitone; the greater being the apotome, and the le the limma. The proportion of the apotome to the limma is 2187 to 2048. AroTOME. In Geometry, a term employed by Euclid and some of the ancient mathematicians to denote. the remainder or difference between two lines or quantities commensurable only in power. Thus, if from the diagonal of a square, a part equal to the side of the square is cut off, the remainder is the apotome, and is represented numerically by the expre ion '\/2— 1. In the tenth book of his Elements, Euclid divides apotomes into six cla es. [s. 80]