What is "grand tour"

n. an extended sightseeing tour undertaken for pleasure

The Grand Tour was the traditional trip of Europe undertaken by mainly upper-class European young men of means, or those of more humble origin who could find a sponsor. The custom flourished from about 1660 until the advent of large-scale rail transport in the 1840s, and was associated with a standard itinerary. It served as an educational rite of passage. Though primarily associated with the British nobility and wealthy landed gentry, similar trips were made by wealthy young men of Protestant Northern European nations on Continental Europe, and from the second half of the 18th century, by some South and North Americans. The tradition declined with the lapse of neo-classical enthusiasm and after rail and steamship travel made the journeys much easier when Thomas Cook made the "Cook's Tour" of early mass tourism a byword.

The New York Times in 2008 described the Grand Tour in this way:

The primary value of the Grand Tour, it was believed, lay in the exposure both to the cultural legacy of classical antiquity and the Renaissance, and to the aristocratic and fashionably polite society of the European continent. In addition, it provided the only opportunity to view specific works of art, and possibly the only chance to hear certain music. A Grand Tour could last from several months to several years. It was commonly undertaken in the company of a Cicerone, a knowledgeable guide or tutor. The Grand Tour had more than superficial cultural importance; as E. P. Thompson stated, "ruling-class control in the 18th century was located primarily in a cultural hegemony, and only secondarily in an expression of economic or physical (military) power."

In essence the Grand Tour was neither a scholar's pilgrimage nor a religious one, though a pleasurable stay in Venice and a cautious residence in Rome were essential. Catholic Grand Tourists followed the same routes as Protestant Whigs. Since the 17th century a tour to such places was also considered essential for budding young artists to understand proper painting and sculpture techniques, though the trappings of the Grand Tour— valets and coachmen, perhaps a cook, certainly a " bear-leader" or scholarly guide— were beyond their reach. The advent of popular guides, such as the Richardsons', did much to popularize such trips, and following the artists themselves, the elite considered travel to such centres as necessary rites of passage. For gentlemen, some works of art were essential to demonstrate the breadth and polish they had received from their tour: in Rome antiquaries like Thomas Jenkins provided access to private collections of antiquities, among which enough proved to be for sale that the English market raised the price of such things, as well as for coins and medals, which formed more portable souvenirs and a respected gentleman's guide to ancient history. Pompeo Batoni made a career of painting English milordi posed with graceful ease among Roman antiquities. Many continued on to Naples, where they viewed Herculaneum and Pompeii, but few ventured far into southern Italy or Malta, and fewer still to Greece, still under Turkish rule.

In road bicycle racing, a 'Grand Tour' refers to one of the three major European professional cycling stage races: Tour de France, Giro d'Italia and Vuelta a España.

Collectively they are termed the Grand Tours, and all three races are similar in format being multi-week races with daily stages. They have a special status in the UCI regulations: more points for the UCI World Tour are distributed in Grand Tours than in other races, and they are the only stage races allowed to last longer than 14 days.

The Tour de France is the oldest and most prestigious of all three, and also the world's most famous cycling race. The Giro d'Italia is the second most important and has occasionally been as popular as the Tour (late 1940s, 1950s, and early 1970s).

Grand Tour is a tour of European cultural centers that once was a standard feature of the education of the British elite.

Grand Tour may also refer to:

The Grand Tour is a series of novels written by science fiction author Ben Bova.

The novels present a theme of exploration and colonization of the solar system by humans in the late 21st century. Most of the books focus on the exploration of one particular planet or planetary moon.

Several recurring themes are presented throughout the series. In particular, most of the solar system bodies whose exploration is the focus of a particular novel are presented as having life, either past or present. Many of the expeditions which explore the planets run into serious difficulty. The protagonists of most of these books are presented as initially weak and/or lacking in ability or confidence, and as part of surviving the trials of the story become heroic.

The future humanity as depicted in the Grand Tour novel series is divided between Greens ( environmentalists) and wealthy industrialists, as well as between secularists/scientists and religious fundamentalists. These conflicts generally are presented as part of the background and often set up the initial conflicts of each of the books. In addition, several of the books reference, or indeed directly deal with, conflicts between wealthy industrialists and small, independent operators seeking to exploit the solar system's vast untapped mineral wealth.

A major theme of the series, which takes center stage in several of the novels, is the search for life on other planets in the solar system. Mars, Mars Life, Jupiter, Venus, Mercury, Saturn, Titan, and Leviathans of Jupiter all deal with this issue. The discovery of life in the solar system often leads to conflicts between religious fundamentalists and scientists, with the former seeing the existence of such life as conflicting with their religious doctrines.

While each novel can be read independent of the others, and they can be read in any order, there are distinct story arcs within the series. The Moonbase arc (which may also include the Asteroid Wars arc), the Mars books, and the Saturn books, for instance, comprise various sagas within the series.

The Grand Tour is a technique developed by Daniel Asimov (1985) which is used to explore multivariate statistical data by means of an animation. The animation, or "movie", consists of a series of distinct views of the data as seen from different directions, displayed on a computer screen, that appear to change continuously and that get closer and closer to all possible views. This allows a human- or computer-based evaluation of these views, with the goal of detecting patterns that will convey useful information about the data.

This technique is like what many museum visitors do when they encounter a complicated abstract sculpture: They walk around it to view it from all directions, in order to understand it better. The human visual system perceives visual information as a pattern on the retina, which is 2-dimensional. Thus walking around to sculpture to understand it better creates a temporal sequence of 2-dimensional images in the brain.

The multivariate data that is the original input for any grand tour visualization is a (finite) set of points in some high-dimensional Euclidean space. This kind of set arises naturally when data is collected. Suppose that for some population of 1000 people, each person is asked to provide their age, height, weight, and number of nose hairs. Thus to each member of the population there is associated an ordered quadruple of numbers. Since n-dimensional Euclidean space is defined as all ordered n-tuples of numbers, this means that the data on 1000 people maybe be thought of as 1000 points in 4-dimensional Euclidean space.

The grand tour converts the spatial complexity of the multivariate data set into temporal complexity by using the relatively simple 2-dimensional views of the projected data as the individual frames of the movie. (These are sometimes called "data views".) The projections will ordinarily be chosen so as not to change too fast, which means that the movie of the data will appear ''continuous' to a human observer.

A grand tour "method" is an algorithm for assigning a sequence of projections onto (usually) 2-dimensional planes to any given dimension of Euclidean space. This allows any particular multivariate data set to be projected onto that sequence of 2-dimensional planes and thereby displayed on a computer screen one after the other, so that the effect is to create a movie of the data.

(Note that after the data has been projected onto a given 2-plane, then in order to displaying it on a computer screen, it is necessary to choose the directions in that 2-plane that will correspond to the horizontal and vertical directions on the computer screen. This is typically a minor detail. But the choice of horizontal and vertical directions should ideally be done so as to minimize any unnecessary apparent "spinning" of the 2-dimensional data view.)