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Greek letters used in mathematics, science, and engineering

Greek letters are used in mathematics, science, engineering, and other areas where mathematical notation is used as symbols for constants, special functions, and also conventionally for variables representing certain quantities. In these contexts, the capital letters and the small letters represent distinct and unrelated entities. Those Greek letters which have the same form as Latin letters are rarely used: capital Α, Β, Ε, Ζ, Η, Ι, Κ, Μ, Ν, Ο, Ρ, Τ, Υ, and Χ. Small ι, ο and υ are also rarely used, since they closely resemble the Latin letters i, o and u. Sometimes, font variants of Greek letters are used as distinct symbols in mathematics, in particular for ε/ϵ and π/ϖ. The archaic letter digamma (Ϝ/ϝ/ϛ) is sometimes used.

The Bayer designation naming scheme for stars typically uses the first Greek letter, α, for the brightest star in each constellation, and runs through the alphabet before switching to Latin letters.

In mathematical finance, the Greeks are the variables denoted by Greek letters used to describe the risk of certain investments.

Typography

Some common conventions:

The Greek letter forms used in mathematics are often different from those used in Greek-language text: they are designed to be used in isolation, not connected to other letters, and some use variant forms which are not normally used in current Greek typography.

The OpenType font format has the feature tag "mgrk" ("Mathematical Greek") to identify a glyph as representing a Greek letter to be used in mathematical (as opposed to Greek language) contexts.

The table below shows a comparison of Greek letters rendered in TeX and HTML. The lowercase Greek letters used in the TeX rendering is an italic style. This is in line with the convention that variables should be italicized. As Greek letters are more often than not used as variables in mathematical formulas, a Greek letter appearing similar to the TeX rendering is more likely to be encountered in works involving mathematics. Unlike Unicode and HTML, TeX does not have special symbols for Greek capital letters that look identical to their Latin counterparts. Instead the Latin capital letters A, E, Z, H, I, K, M, N, O, P, T, X are used for capital Alpha, Epsilon, Zeta, Eta, Iota, Kappa, Mu, Nu, Omicron, Rho, Tau, and Chi respectively.

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Concepts represented by a Greek letter

Αα (alpha)

Ββ (beta)

Γγ (gamma)

Δδ (delta)

Εε (epsilon)

(digamma)

  • is sometimes used to represent the digamma function, though the Latin letter F (which is nearly identical) is usually substituted.
  • A hypothetical particle Ϝ speculated to be implicated in the 750&nbsp;GeV diphoton excess, now known to be simply a statistical anomaly

Ζζ (zeta)

Ηη (eta)

Θθ (theta)

Ιι (iota)

Κκ (kappa)

Λλ (lambda)

Μμ (mu)

Νν (nu)

Ξξ (xi)

Οο (omicron)

  • represents:
  • O (for "Ordnung") in Donald Knuth's reading of the big O notation

Ππ (pi)

Ρρ (rho)

Σσς (sigma)

Ττ (tau)

ϒυ (upsilon)

Φφ (phi)

Note: The empty set symbol ∅ looks similar, but is unrelated to the Greek letter.

Χχ (chi)

Ψψ (psi)

Ωω (omega)

See also

References

External links