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. 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 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) 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 letter "A". Unicode originally included a limited set of such letter forms in its Letterlike Symbols 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 not include a set of normal serif letters in the set. Still they have found some usage on social media, for example by people who want a stylized user name, and in email spam, in an attempt to bypass filters. All these letter shapes may be manipulated with MathML'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. The first column labelled as "serif normal" is in fact non-symbol letters from the BMP. These will not have serifs if the font is non-serif, this table selects a serif font for them. In most cases the code point is the sum of the index number on the left and the number at the top of the column. Pink and yellow cells and '-' index indicates this rule does not apply.
Latin letters The 24 characters with pink backgrounds are not in the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block, but instead in the BMP letterlike symbols block, for example, ℛ (script capital 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. 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:
U+2113 ℓ SCRIPT SMALL L; "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 symbol. U+2118 ℘ SCRIPT CAPITAL P is a symbol for Weierstrass's elliptic function. It is officially aliased as U+2118 ℘ WEIERSTRASS ELLIPTIC FUNCTION.
Greek letters and symbols
Digits
Glyph variants Variation selectors may be used to specify chancery (U+FE00) vs roundhand (U+FE01) forms, if a computer font 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:
See also Greek letters used in mathematics, science, and engineering List of mathematical uses of Latin letters Mathematical operators and symbols in Unicode List of typographic features § Features intended for digits and math Mathematical notation Symbols for Legacy Computing Supplement for outlined Latin glyphs and numerals
References