I must confess that I have an irrational fondness for the use of weird symbols in math and technical documents, whether it's for a homework assignment in school or a white-paper for work.
My unit tests are literally full of hieroglyphics. My favorite design doc to this day is one where I sprinkled Sumerian cuneiform throughout the text, e.g. ππππ΅π and ππ π (Gilgamesh and Enkidu) instead of Alice and Bob.
I left college with a math degree and a profound antipathy for weird cursive symbols. The one that nearly killed me was the Greek "xi". I couldn't pronounce it, and I couldn't write it with any fluency, and in some of the classes I took it was everywhere.
Notably, this is distinct from ("MATHEMATICAL SCRIPT CAPITAL P").
> Books were printed in Fraktur, where the p looks quite normal, i.e., quite different from a handwritten SΓΌtterlin p which could explain, why it hasn't been replaced in the publication of Amandus Schwarz.
Indeed. ("MATHEMATICAL FRAKTUR CAPITAL P") is also separate (but also, Unicode considers these mathematical symbols to exist separately from "text written in Fraktur script". So you get separate characters allocated for these symbols, but they're not intended to be suitable for printing in Fraktur - which is supposedly a presentation (i.e. typeface selection) issue.
Personally I'm not convinced that mathematical symbols derived from Latin or Greek (or other) scripts really have any claim to being separate "characters". Surely that's what variation selectors are for?
Strangely, the most comfortable I've felt with symbols was when learning quantum computing. At the time, there was no established standard (perhaps it has a standard now), but the symbols were used more intuitively than any other math class I've taken.
One thing I like about programming languages is that they usually constrain themselves to strings of ASCII characters, instead of using lots of more or less inscrutable symbols like mathematics does. For example, where a mathematician writes "Ξ£", a programmer simply writes "sum".
The letter β: name and origin? (2017)
(mathoverflow.net)192 points by IdealeZahlen 9 hours ago | 75 comments
Comments
Googling for "Math squiggle that looks like a cursive P" is not a very elegant or convenient way of learning new symbol names.
I wish every proof or equation came with a little table that gave the English pronunciation and some context for each symbol used.
It would make it a lot easier to look up tutorials & ask questions.
My unit tests are literally full of hieroglyphics. My favorite design doc to this day is one where I sprinkled Sumerian cuneiform throughout the text, e.g. ππππ΅π and ππ π (Gilgamesh and Enkidu) instead of Alice and Bob.
Good enough for me.
Notably, this is distinct from ("MATHEMATICAL SCRIPT CAPITAL P").
> Books were printed in Fraktur, where the p looks quite normal, i.e., quite different from a handwritten SΓΌtterlin p which could explain, why it hasn't been replaced in the publication of Amandus Schwarz.
Indeed. ("MATHEMATICAL FRAKTUR CAPITAL P") is also separate (but also, Unicode considers these mathematical symbols to exist separately from "text written in Fraktur script". So you get separate characters allocated for these symbols, but they're not intended to be suitable for printing in Fraktur - which is supposedly a presentation (i.e. typeface selection) issue.
Personally I'm not convinced that mathematical symbols derived from Latin or Greek (or other) scripts really have any claim to being separate "characters". Surely that's what variation selectors are for?
That seems a ridiculous choice for a symbol β turning one of the most symmetrical letters upside down!
Background: https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/questions/51563/what-is...