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The word monad comes from the Greek word μονάς (from the word μόνος, which means "one", "single", "unique") and has had many meanings in different contexts in philosophy, mathematics, computing and music:

• Microsoft's new command shell is code named Monad. Most shells (such as Windows® CMD.EXE and the UNIX shells SH, KSH, CSH, and BASH) operate by executing a command or utility in a new process, and presenting the results (or errors) to the user as text. Text-based processing is the way in which system interaction is done with these shells. Over the years, a large number of text processing utilities—such as sed, AWK, and PERL—have evolved to support this interaction. The heritage of this operational process is very rich. These shells also have another type of command; these commands are built-in to the shell and do not start a new process, but run within the process context of the shell. Examples of built-in commands are the KSH typeset command and the CMD.EXE DIR command. In most shells the number of built-in commands is somewhat small, so over time a large number of utilities that have been created. The MSH.EXE shell is very different from these traditional shells. First, this shell does not use text as the basis for interaction with the system, but uses an object model based on the .NET platform. As we will see, this provides a much different, and better, way to interact with the system. Second, the list of built-in commands is much longer; this is done to ensure that the interaction with the object model is accomplished with the highest regard to integrity with respect to interacting with the system. Third, the shell provides consistency with regard to interacting with built-in commands through the use of a single parser, rather than relying on each command to create its own parser for parameters. Monad will be shipped with Microsoft's Exchange 12 and MOMvNext (and possibliy earlier).

Read more on MSDN's Channel 9: http://channel9.msdn.com/default.aspx/Channel9.MSHWiki

• Among the Pythagoreans (followers of Pythagoras) the monad was the first thing that came into existence. The monad begot the dyad, which begot the numbers, the numbers begat points, which begot lines, which begat two-dimensional entities, which begat three-dimensional entities, which begat bodies, which begot the four elements earth, water, fire and air, from which the rest of our world is built up. The monad was thus a central concept in the cosmology of the Pythagoreans, who held the belief that the world was - literally - built up by numbers. (The source of this claim is Diogenes Laertius' book Lives of Eminent Philosophers.)
• Within certain variations of Gnosticism, especially those inspired by Monoimus, the Monad was the higher being which created lesser gods, or elements (similar to aeons). This view was according to Hippolytus inspired by the Pythagoreans.
• The Monad appears in the alchemical texts of the Hermetica, part four of the corpus is called The Cup or Monad.
• The Monad is the Chinese symbol of duality in nature.
• In the writings of the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, monads are atomistic mental objects which experience the world from a particular point of view. Leibniz's theory does not posit physical space; rather, physical objects are constructs of the collective experiences of monads. This way of putting it is misleading, however; monads do not interact with each other (are "windowless"), but rather are imbued at creation with all their future experiences in a system of pre-established harmony. The arrangements of the monads make up the faith and structure of this world, which to Leibniz was "the best of all possible worlds".
• Within mathematics:
  • in non-standard analysis, a monad consists of all those numbers infinitesimally close to a given number;
  • in category theory, a monad, also known as triple, is a type of functor important in the theory of adjoint functors. This term has a different root than the ones described above; it was formed by combining "monoid" and "triad". See monad (category theory).
  • In pure functional programming languages such as Haskell, monads are used as data types that encapsulate the functional I/O-activity, in such a manner that the side-effects of I/O are not allowed to spread out of the part of the program that is not functional (imperative). See monads in functional programming.
• Technocracy Incorporated describes its symbol as being a geometric representation of the monad.
• Northern Pacific Railway used a red and black monad symbol in its trademark.
• In music a monad is a single pitch or pitch class. See also: Dyad, Trichord, Tetrachord, Hexachord.

See also

• Monism

• Disambiguation pages