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The letter ℘: name and origin? (2017)

(mathoverflow.net)
283 points IdealeZahlen | 1 comments | 14 Nov 24 16:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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non- ◴[14 Nov 24 18:26 UTC] No.42139412[source]▶
One thing I've always struggled with Math is keeping track of symbols I don't know the name of yet.

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.

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Symbiote ◴[14 Nov 24 19:40 UTC] No.42140285[source]▶
The "unicode" program (in Ubuntu's package repository) gives the Unicode entry for any character:

  $ unicode ℘
  U+2118 SCRIPT CAPITAL P
  UTF-8: e2 84 98 UTF-16BE: 2118 Decimal: ℘ Octal: \020430
  ℘
  Category: Sm (Symbol, Math); East Asian width: N (neutral)
  Unicode block: 2100..214F; Letterlike Symbols
  Bidi: ON (Other Neutrals)
  Age: Assigned as of Unicode 1.1.0 (June, 1993)
Or you can ask Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%e2%84%98 (manually URL-escaped for HN)
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1. zamadatix ◴[14 Nov 24 20:33 UTC] No.42140890[source]▶
If you already have a copyable version of the character it also works in the original Google search. Or any other place you can put it. The problem is when you don't have the literal character as text (say, an image, video, or non-digital source) and need to reproduce it to do that lookup in the first place.