neptunium, Np, atomic number 93(noun)

a radioactive transuranic metallic element; found in trace amounts in uranium ores; a by-product of the production of plutonium

nurse practitioner, NP, nurse clinician(noun)

a registered nurse who has received special training and can perform many of the duties of a physician

NP(Noun)

Abbreviation of "non-deterministic polynomial"; the complexity class of computational problems that a non-deterministic Turing machine can solve in polynomial time.

NP

Extremely. Used to modify adjectives describing a level or quality of difficulty; the connotation is often ‘more so than it should be’. This is generalized from the computer-science terms NP-hard and NP-complete; NP-complete problems all seem to be very hard, but so far no one has found a proof that they are. NP is the set of Nondeterministic-Polynomial problems, those that can be completed by a nondeterministic Turing machine in an amount of time that is a polynomial function of the size of the input; a solution for one NP-complete problem would solve all the others. “Coding a BitBlt implementation to perform correctly in every case is NP-annoying.”Note, however, that strictly speaking this usage is misleading; there are plenty of easy problems in class NP. NP-complete problems are hard not because they are in class NP, but because they are the hardest problems in class NP.