[templelane]

Hi, does anybody know what superlinear means? A biological relationship I have been reading about has been described as such and I don't know exactly what it means. I have tried normal means of knowledge obtainment (yes you guessed it google) to no avail.
Argh should have paid more attention in high school maths!


Cheers, TL

[Capuchin]

I would assume that it means y increases with x at a rate that is faster than a linear relationship (so y=x^2 would be superlinear for x>0). This obviously describes a huge number of functions.
Does that make sense in context?

"super" meaning "above", as in superluminal velocity. (We tend to take "super" to mean something akin to "extra" in every day life so you might expect something that it superlinear to be even more linear than an ordinary linear relationship, but the latin root "supra" means "above")

This is just an educated guess. I haven't come across the term in 4 years of undergrad physics.