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 have seen math textbooks that have a "table of symbols" or similar, by the table of contents or the index. It's really helpful. Also nice to have - a "map of the book" (I don't know a better name for this) which indicates graphically which sections of the book depend on which other sections. "Dependency graph", maybe?

I wish music books would do this too - I've been self-teaching myself a little classical guitar, and some of the scores I'm reading have various symbols that have taken me quite a while to figure out. I eventually determined that a bold III means to play in third position in some books, but these things aren't consistent between publishers.

Classical music is relatively standardized. Roman numerals to indicate position are standard practice for all string instruments (I remember learning this as a beginning bass player as a kid). You will sometimes see Roman numerals used as a means of identifying chords relative to the tonic of the current key, but that’s uncommon and the notation is a bit different than the position notation in how it’s placed on the staff (if it even appears on the staff and not in a harmonic analysis).¹ I’ve not seen the upper- and lower-case distinction in roman numeral notation I learned somewhere which uses cases to distinguish between major and minor in any classical music harmonization texts, but I may have just paid insufficient attention.

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1. I have a vague notion that it might show up in figured bass once in a great while, but I could be wrong.