The word canonical is used to indicate a particular choice from of a number of possible conventions. This convention allows a mathematical object or class of objects to be uniquely identified or standardized. For example, the right-hand rule for the cross product is a convention, which corresponds to the canonical vector space orientation in .

This entry contributed by Todd Rowland

Derbyshire, J. Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics. New York: Penguin, p. 40, 2004.

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Rowland, Todd. "Canonical." From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource, created by Eric W. Weisstein. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Canonical.html