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Monad, is an English term meaning "one," "single," or "unit," especially in technical contexts. It comes from the Late Latin stem monad-, which comes from the Greek word monos or μονάς (from the word μόνος, which means "one", "single", or "unique"), and may refer to several thing in different fields:

• In Non-standard analysis, a monad is the collection of all numbers infinitesimally close to a given number.
• In category theory a monad is a type of functor.
• In functional programming monads are type constructors that are used in functional programming languages to capture various notions of sequential computation.
• "Monad" is the code-name of Windows PowerShell, a command line interface for Microsoft Windows.
• In philosophy the term monad is used in a number of distinct ways:
  • Monism is the metaphysical and theological view that all is of one essence, and this essence is sometimes called the monad.
  • In the Technocratic movement the Monad is the symbol of Technocracy Incorporated (and the Technocratic movement).
  • In Early modern philosophy monads are a basic unit of perceptual reality in the Monadology of Gottfried Leibniz and the book "Physical Monadology" by Immanuel Kant.
  • In Hermetica, The Cup or Monad is one of the texts making up the Corpus Hermetica
  • In Ancient Greek Philosophy the term was used in several ways.
    • For Epicurus monads were the smallest units of matter, much like Democritus's notion of an atom
    • For many others, including Pythagoras, Parmenides, Xenophanes, Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus, Monad was a term for God or the first being, or the totality off all beings.
    • In Gnosticism, the Monad was the most primal aspect of God.

See also

• Dyad
• Triad
• Tetrad
• Pentad

• Symbols
• Pythagorean symbols
• Disambiguation pages