The letter ℘: name and origin? (2017)

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.

I can relate. Ages ago, before Safe Search and search result tailored to one‘s history and preferences, I was trying to figure out how to write that big union symbol (∪) in LaTeX and googled for Big Cup LaTeX. I got _very_ different and unexpected results.

Googling guitar-related stuff is how I learned there’s such a thing as c-string women’s underwear & bathing suit bottoms, not just g-strings.

That was, briefly, a real WTF moment.

[edit] oh my god, of course that one didn’t come from searching guitar topics, that makes no sense given the standard tuning. I’m pretty sure I was googling strings in the C language when I hit that one, lol. I did probably accidentally land on “g string” after searching without thinking about what would obviously come up, when looking up guitar topics, and must have combined the two incidents in my memory.

This reminds me of the time when searching for “c string” would probably result in “The C Programming Language” at number 1.