Yam (vegetable) Yam (vegetable) Yam is the common name for some plant species in the genus "Dioscorea" (family Dioscoreaceae) that form edible tubers. Yams are perennial herbaceous vines cultivated for the consumption of their starchy tubers in many temperate and tropical world regions. The tubers themselves are also called "yams", having numerous cultivars and related species. In parts of the United States and Canada, "yam" is sometimes used to refer to varieties of the unrelated sweet potato ("Ipomoea batatas"). The name, yam, appears to derive from Portuguese "inhame" or Canarian (Spain) "ñame", which derived from West African languages during trade. The main
History of manifolds and varieties spaces with a differentiable or topological structure, while "variety" refers to spaces with an algebraic structure, as in algebraic varieties. In Romance languages, manifold is translated as "variety" – such spaces with a differentiable structure are literally translated as "analytic varieties", while spaces with an algebraic structure are called "algebraic varieties". Thus for example, the french word "" means topological manifold. In the same vein, the Japanese word "" (tayōtai) also encompasses both manifold and variety. ("" (tayō) means various.) Ancestral to the modern concept of a manifold were several important results of 18th and 19th century mathematics. The oldest