What is an upside down U symbol in math?
A mathematical symbol is a figure or a combination of figures that is used to represent a mathematical object, an action on mathematical objects, or for structuring the other symbols that occur in a formula.Many symbols are needed for expressing all mathematics as formulas are entirely constituted with symbols of various types.
The letters of the Latin alphabet are the most basic symbols.The Hindu–Arabic numeral system uses the decimal digits to represent numbers.Lower-case letters were used for variables and constants in the past.Many mathematical objects are represented by letters.The Greek alphabet and some Hebrew letters are used in modern mathematics as the number of these sorts has increased.In mathematical formulas, the standard type is upright for upper and lower case Greek letters.Other typefaces are used for having more symbols.
Latin and Greek letters are not described in this article.Variable and List of mathematical constants are used for such uses.Some symbols that are described here have the same shape as the letter from which they are derived.
Many other symbols are used for the needs of mathematicians.diacritics and punctuation marks are used for their origin.Other, such as + and, have been specially designed for mathematics, often by changing some letters.
The entries of a glossary are usually sorted by topics.There is no natural order on symbols and many symbols are used in different parts of mathematics with different meanings.The choices that had to be made were summarized below.
The sections of the article are sorted by technicality.The first section contains the symbols that are encountered in most mathematical texts, and that is supposed to be known even by beginners.The last sections contain symbols that are specific to some area of mathematics, but are ignored outside these areas.Although most of the entries are elementary, the long section on brackets makes it easier to find a symbol entry.
By their position inside a formula and the nature of other parts of the formula that are close to them, most symbols have multiple meanings.
The different meanings of a symbol are grouped in the section corresponding to their most common meaning as readers may not be aware of the area of mathematics related to the symbol that they are looking for.
A symbol may have different entries depending on the meaning.The box symbol is used to represent the neighboring parts of a formula that contains the symbol.Examples of use can be found in brackets.
There are two printed versions of most symbols.They can be displayed in a variety of ways.It is easier to use search engines and copy-pasting with the Unicode version.The LaTeX rendering is considered to be a standard in mathematics.In this article, the symbols are used for labelling their entry and the LaTeX version is used in their description.To find out how to type a symbol in LaTeX, you need to look at the source of the article.
The corresponding symbol is the entry name for most symbols.To find the entry of a symbol, it's best to type or copy the symbol into the search textbox.When possible, the entry name of a symbol is an anchor, which makes it easy to link from another article.One has to look at the article source to know that there is an anchor in an entry name with special characters.
When there is an article on the symbol itself, it is linked to the entry name.
There are several logical symbols used in mathematics.See List of logic symbols for symbols that are rarely used.