4 ms·
When I used to teach LaTeX classes, most of my students were math department secretaries, so I always made a point of explaining when someone would want \Pi ver
by dhosek 5y ago
When I used to teach LaTeX classes, most of my students were math department secretaries, so I always made a point of explaining when someone would want \Pi versus \prod or \Sigma vs \sum.
Of course, being the callow youth that I was back then, I also tended to pronounce the names of the letters like a classicist so ψ is not pronounced "sigh" but rather "p-see", and similar ξ is not "zee" but "k-see." A childhood spent surrounded by people with Slavic surnames had my mouth well-trained to manage odd consonant clusters at the beginnings of words.
- 8note 5y agoEveryone I know pronounces ξ as "double squiggly" and ς as "squiggly"
- bee_rider 5y agoNot 'fancy c' and 'fancy epsilon,' disrespectively? (which is a new word but one I think we should spread).
- exmadscientist 5y agoBack in physics grad school it surprised everyone else that I not only pronounced 'ξ' as "ksi" rather than "cascade" or "squiggle" but, more amazingly, could actually write it like ξ rather than a squiggle... I still don't really get why that's impressive.
- jacobolus 5y agoThe trick to writing ξ is to notice that it is a fast/sloppy cursive way of writing three parallel horizontal bars (Ξ).
- cozzyd 5y agoWell, Cascade is the name of the particle, not the symbol... (and it would normally be upper-case, no?) for non-physicists: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_baryon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xi_baryon Also, for this reason, surprised it's one of the more rarely used Greek symbols...
- cozzyd 5y agoyes... I hated it when professors used them on the board because I don't know how to write them other than making a squiggly...
- potato44 5y agoThe way I remember how to draw xi is horizontal line, epsilon, tail.
- captainmuon 5y agoWe had one prof who wrote these as ς with one, two, or even three squiggles below. I never figured out what letters they were supposed to be (zeta, sigma, xi?), but read them as something translating to "zig-zag".
- Symbiote 5y agoς and ζ look similar to their handwritten Roman equivalents. ς is end sigma, the letter σ (S) when written at the end of the word. ζ is zi (Z), it's not unusual to write a lower case Roman z with a similar tail. My mum was taught to do this, which confused me when I was learning to read. ξ is xi (X).
- evanb 5y agoζ and ξ are “squigma” while ς really is sigma.