Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols is a

Unicode block A Unicode block is one of several contiguous ranges of numeric character codes (code points) of the Unicode character set that are defined by the Unicode Consortium for administrative and documentation purposes. Typically, proposals such as the ...

comprising styled forms of

Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...

and

Greek Greek may refer to: Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe: *Greeks, an ethnic group *Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family **Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor of all kno ...

letters and decimal digits that enable mathematicians to denote different notions with different letter styles. The letters in various fonts often have specific, fixed meanings in particular areas of mathematics. By providing uniformity over numerous mathematical articles and books, these conventions help to read mathematical formulas. These also may be used to differentiate between concepts that share a letter in a single problem.

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

now includes many such symbols (in the range U+1D400–U+1D7FF). The rationale behind this is that it enables design and usage of special mathematical characters (

fonts In movable type, metal typesetting, a font is a particular #Characteristics, size, weight and style of a ''typeface'', defined as the set of fonts that share an overall design. For instance, the typeface Bauer Bodoni (shown in the figure) inclu ...

) that include all necessary properties to differentiate from other alphanumerics, e.g. in mathematics an italic letter "𝐴" can have a different meaning from a

roman Roman or Romans most often refers to: *Rome, the capital city of Italy *Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD *Roman people, the people of Roman civilization *Epistle to the Romans, shortened to Romans, a letter w ...

letter "A". Unicode originally included a limited set of such letter forms in its

Letterlike Symbols Letterlike Symbols is a Unicode block containing 80 characters which are constructed mainly from the glyphs of one or more letters. In addition to this block, Unicode includes full styled mathematical alphabets, although Unicode does not exp ...

block before completing the set of Latin and Greek letter forms in this block beginning in version 3.1. Unicode expressly recommends that these characters not be used in general text as a substitute for presentational markup; the letters are specifically designed to be semantically different from each other. Unicode does include a set of normal serif letters in the set. Still they have found some usage on

social media Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the Content creation, creation, information exchange, sharing and news aggregator, aggregation of Content (media), content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongs ...

, for example by people who want a stylized user name, and in

email spam Email spam, also referred to as junk email, spam mail, or simply spam, refers to unsolicited messages sent in bulk via email. The term originates from a Spam (Monty Python), Monty Python sketch, where the name of a canned meat product, "Spam (food ...

, in an attempt to bypass

filters Filtration is a physical process that separates solid matter and fluid from a mixture. Filter, filtering, filters or filtration may also refer to: Science and technology Computing * Filter (higher-order function), in functional programming * Fil ...

. All these letter shapes may be manipulated with

MathML Mathematical Markup Language (MathML) is a pair of mathematical markup languages, an application of XML for describing mathematical notations and capturing both its structure and content. Its aim is to natively integrate mathematical formulae ...

's attribute mathvariant. The introduction date of some of the more commonly used symbols can be found in the Table of mathematical symbols by introduction date.

Tables of styled letters and digits

These tables show all styled forms of Latin and Greek letters, symbols and digits in the Unicode Standard, with the normal unstyled forms of these characters shown with a cyan background (the basic unstyled letters may be serif or sans-serif depending upon the font). The styled characters are mostly located in the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block, but the 24 characters in cells with a pink background are located in the

letterlike symbols Letterlike Symbols is a Unicode block containing 80 characters which are constructed mainly from the glyphs of one or more letters. In addition to this block, Unicode includes full styled mathematical alphabets, although Unicode does not exp ...

block, for example, ℛ () is at U+211B rather than the expected U+1D4AD which is reserved. In the code charts for the Unicode Standard, the reserved code points corresponding to the pink cell are annotated with the name and code point of the correct character.Unicode code chart U1D400 (PDF)
/ref> There are a few characters which have names that suggest that they should belong in the tables below, but in fact do not because their official character names are misnomers: * ; "despite its character name, this symbol is derived from a special italicized version of the small letter l". It has various other specialized uses, such as a liter symbol and as the

azimuthal quantum number In quantum mechanics, the azimuthal quantum number is a quantum number for an atomic orbital that determines its angular momentum operator, orbital angular momentum and describes aspects of the angular shape of the orbital. The azimuthal quantum ...

symbol. * is a symbol for Weierstrass's elliptic function. It is officially aliased as .

Latin letters

The Unicode values of the characters in the tables below, except those shown with or index values of '–', are obtained by adding the base values from the "U+" header row to the index values in the left column (both values are hexadecimal).

Greek letters and symbols

Digits

The Unicode values of the characters in the tables below are obtained by adding the hexadecimal base values from the "U+" header row to the index values in the left column.

Glyph variants

Variation selectors Variation Selectors is a Unicode block containing 16 variation selectors used to specify a Variant form (Unicode), glyph variant for a preceding character. They are currently used to specify standardized variation sequences for mathematical symb ...

may be used to specify

chancery Chancery may refer to: Offices and administration * Court of Chancery, the chief court of equity in England and Wales until 1873 ** Equity (law), also called chancery, the body of jurisprudence originating in the Court of Chancery ** Courts of e ...

(U+FE00) vs

roundhand Round hand (also roundhand) is a type of handwriting and calligraphy originating in England in the 1660s primarily by the writing masters John Ayres and William Banson. Characterised by an open flowing Handwriting, hand (style) and subtle contras ...

(U+FE01) forms, if a

computer font A computer font is implemented as a digital data file containing a set of graphically related glyphs. A computer font is designed and created using a font editor. A computer font specifically designed for the computer screen, and not for printi ...

is available that supports them:

Chart for the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block

History

The following Unicode-related documents record the purpose and process of defining specific characters in the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block:

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols Mathematical notation Unicode blocks Mathematical symbols