Exploring new areas or opportunities.

Diverging from an established path.

In radioactivity, the portion of all decays that take a given pathway. For example, californium-252 decays by alpha decay ~97% of the time, and by spontaneous fission ~3% of the time; so the branching ratio is about 0.97 in favor of alpha decay, and about 0.03 in favor spontaneous fission.

(mathematics, probability theory) A stochastic process which typically models reproduction of objects, with the assumption that the reproductions of individual particles are mutually independent.

In computing, tree data structures, and game theory, the branching factor is the number of children at each node, the outdegree.

In particle physics and nuclear physics, the branching fraction (or branching ratio) for a decay is the fraction of particles that decay by an individual decay mode or with respect to the total number of particles which decay.

In logic a branching quantifier, also called a Henkin quantifier, finite partially ordered quantifier or even nonlinear quantifier, is a partial ordering