I was juat talking to the kids about this on Tuesday (apropos "What comes after Plus and Tmes?"). Mathematica's math palette includes extinct Greek characters like curly rho, koppa, stigma, digamma, and sampi. There's also Hebrew, e.g. Qoph. An oversize lowercase rho makes a decent prodigal. --rwg On Fri, Mar 18, 2011 at 3:05 PM, Marc LeBrun <mlb@well.com> wrote:
[just some of us]
="quad" <quadricode@gmail.com> I love mathematical typography, with a passion.
Yay! Double geek score!
Me too, but mainly as a spectator sport 'cause the tools are so painful.
I've long wanted to be able to typeset some silly notation of mine for the "product integral" operator P and its inverse q:
P f(x) ^ qx := exp integral ln f(x) dx
(ie superscript qx) analogous to the everyday "Leibniz" notation for integrals and derivatives:
P would look like an integral sign with the top continuing to loop around and joining back to the stem--a stretchy "P" like how the integral sign is a stretchy "S".
q might just be a regular or boldface q, analogous to d, but there also should be a "curly q" (ha ha), analogous to the partial derivative symbol.
BTW I also like to call P the "prodigal", but I've never found a good name for the q operator--"quiverative"? I dunno.
It might also make sense to adopt the Greek rho in some form instead of q, since the operator is to ratios like what delta is to differences...
Anyway, could you actually make a typeface with such symbols in it? Perhaps even teach TeX how to use it? Or maybe even just MS Word? I love the look, but I gave up trying to actually use Metafont long ago...