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The symbol , first used in set theory and logic by Giuseppe Peano and now used in mathematics in general for set membership ("belongs to"), evolved from the letter epsilon, since the symbol was originally used as an abbreviation for the Latin word est.
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.
A mathematical symbol is a figure or a combination of figures that is used to represent a mathematical object, an action on mathematical objects, a relation between mathematical objects, or for structuring the other symbols that occur in a formula. As formulas are entirely constituted with symbols of various types, many symbols are needed for ...
The symbol ∈ means is. So a ∈ b is read as a is a certain b; … The symbol itself is a stylized lowercase Greek letter epsilon ("ϵ"), the first letter of the word ἐστί , which means "is".
Other names include the permutation symbol, antisymmetric symbol, or alternating symbol, which refer to its antisymmetric property and definition in terms of permutations. The standard letters to denote the Levi-Civita symbol are the Greek lower case epsilon ε or ϵ , or less commonly the Latin lower case e .
Uncountable ordinals also exist, along with uncountable epsilon numbers whose index is an uncountable ordinal. The smallest epsilon number ε 0 appears in many induction proofs, because for many purposes transfinite induction is only required up to ε 0 (as in Gentzen's consistency proof and the proof of Goodstein's theorem).
The following table lists many common symbols, together with their name, how they should be read out loud, and the related field of mathematics. Additionally, the subsequent columns contains an informal explanation, a short example, the Unicode location, the name for use in HTML documents, [1] and the LaTeX symbol.
Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols is a Unicode block comprising styled forms of Latin and Greek 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.