Ternary

Ternary (from Latin ternarius) or trinary is an adjective meaning "composed of three items". It can refer to:

Mathematics and logic

 * Ternary numeral system, a base-3 counting system
 * Balanced ternary, a positional numeral system, useful for comparison logic
 * Ternary logic, a logic system with the values true, false, and some other value
 * Ternary plot or ternary graph, a plot that shows the ratios of three proportions
 * Ternary relation, a finitary relation in which the number of places in the relation is three
 * Ternary operation, an operation that takes three parameters
 * Ternary function, a function that takes three arguments

Computing

 * Ternary signal, a signal that can assume three significant values
 * Ternary computer, a computer using a ternary numeral system
 * Ternary tree, a tree data structure in computer science
 * Ternary search tree, a ternary (three-way) tree data structure of strings
 * Ternary search, a computer science technique for finding the minimum or maximum of a function
 * Ternary heap, a data structure in computer science
 * Ternary Golay code, a perfect [11, 6, 5] ternary linear code
 * ?:, a ternary conditional operator used for basic conditional expressions in several programming languages

Other uses

 * Ternary complex, a complex formed by the interaction of three molecules
 * Ternary compound, a type of chemical compound
 * Ternary form, a form used for structuring music
 * Ternary name for any taxon below the rank of species