increment

The bidding war stretched 20 minutes before a different anonymous collector bidding over the telephone and lobbing bids in multimillion-dollar increments eventually won the work.

Eight years later, the GOP — the party that has spent decades trying to privatize Social Security and Medicare — is trying a different approach: Destroying the program by increments, one painful piece at a time.

The challenge is tied to the interval between computational steps: to capture rapid events such as supernova evolution, the simulation must advance in very small time increments.

“Caesar had now been performing for eight years,” Mr. Margolick writes, “and, thin and haggard, wore every week of it . . . it had happened in spurts rather than in increments.”

Cohen, the numismatist, said coins appeal to many buyers because they can be sold in increments, rather than all at once like a bar.