Artichoke Artichoke The globe artichoke ("Cynara cardunculus" var. "scolymus") is a variety of a species of thistle cultivated as a food. The edible portion of the plant consists of the flower buds before the flowers come into bloom. The budding artichoke flower-head is a cluster of many budding small flowers (an inflorescence), together with many bracts, on an edible base. Once the buds bloom, the structure changes to a coarse, barely edible form. Another variety of the same species is the cardoon, a perennial plant native to the Mediterranean region. Both wild forms and cultivated varieties (cultivars) exist. This vegetable grows
Secant variety Secant variety In algebraic geometry, the secant variety formula_1, or the variety of chords, of a projective variety formula_2 is the Zariski closure of the union of all secant lines (chords) to "V" in formula_3: (for formula_5, the line formula_6 is the tangent line.) It is also the image under the projection formula_7 of the closure "Z" of the incidence variety Note that "Z" has dimension formula_9 and so formula_1 has dimension at most formula_9. More generally, the formula_12 secant variety is the Zariski closure of the union of the linear spaces spanned by collections of k+1 points on formula_13.