Look up sieve in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

A sieve is a tool to separate materials of one characteristic (for example, liquids) from materials of another (for example, solids).

Sieve may also refer to:

Places

• Sieve River in Italy

Computing

• Sieve (mail filtering language), a standard for specifying mail filters
• Scale-invariant feature transform (or SIFT), a computer vision algorithm that detects and describes local features in images
• Sieve C++ Parallel Programming System, an auto-parallelizing compiler for C++

Mathematics

• Sieve (category theory)
• Cyclic sieving, a phenomenon in combinatorics
• Sieve estimator (statistics and econometrics)
• Sieve theory, a technique for counting or filtering sets of numbers
  • General number field sieve
  • Large sieve
  • Quadratic sieve
  • Sieve of Atkin
  • Sieve of Eratosthenes
  • Sieve of Sundaram
  • Sieve of Pritchard

Science and healthcare

• Sieve, in medicine, a "surgical sieve" refers to a very general list of diagnostic or pathological headings, against which any finding can be compared
• Sieving coefficient, used in transport phenomena, in chemistry
• Sieve tube element, an elongated cell in the phloem tissue of flowering plants

Tools

• Sieve, a firefighting tool used when a fire engine drafts water from a body of water; it is a large metal strainer that is attached to the end of a hard suction hose that prevents debris from entering the hose
• Sieve, a gardening tool, known as a riddle, used to separate soil particles and provide a finer tilth, for example by removing stones and twigs
• Sieve, in plumbing, a stainless steel strainer

Other uses

• Sieve (hieroglyph), an ancient Egyptian hieroglyph
• Sieve, or strainer, on rivers is a dangerous obstacle that water can pass through, but people cannot (see Obstacle in whitewater canoeing)
• Sieve, in sports such as hockey or lacrosse, is a common slang term used when referring to a goaltender who allows many or weak goals
• Sieve analysis, a practice or procedure used to assess the particle size distribution of a granular material, such as soil

See also

• CIV (band), a New York City punk rock band pronounced "sieve"