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Quantities are generally represented by a symbol formed from single letters of the Latin or Greek alphabet. Symbols for quantities are set in italic type, independent of the type used in the rest of the text. If in a text different quantities use the same letter symbol, they can be distinguished via subscripts.
Variables are generally denoted by a single letter, most often from the Latin alphabet and less often from the Greek, which may be lowercase or capitalized. The letter may be followed by a subscript: a number (as in x 2), another variable (x i), a word or abbreviation of a word (x total) or a mathematical expression (x 2i + 1).
Latin and 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.
Sometimes boxes or shapes are used to indicate unknown values. As such, number sentences are used to introduce students to notions of structure and elementary algebra prior to a more formal treatment of these concepts. A number sentence without unknowns is equivalent to a logical proposition expressed using the notation of arithmetic.
The English language has a number of words that denote specific or approximate quantities that are themselves not numbers. [1] Along with numerals, and special-purpose words like some, any, much, more, every, and all, they are Quantifiers. Quantifiers are a kind of determiner and occur in many constructions with other determiners, like articles ...
Greek letters (e.g. θ, β) are commonly used to denote unknown parameters (population parameters). [3]A tilde (~) denotes "has the probability distribution of". Placing a hat, or caret (also known as a circumflex), over a true parameter denotes an estimator of it, e.g., ^ is an estimator for .
The use of Latin and Greek letters as symbols for denoting mathematical objects is not described in this article. For such uses, see Variable (mathematics) and List of mathematical constants . However, some symbols that are described here have the same shape as the letter from which they are derived, such as ∏ {\displaystyle \textstyle \prod ...
Letters are typically used for naming—in mathematical jargon, one says representing—mathematical objects. The Latin and Greek alphabets are used extensively, but a few letters of other alphabets are also used sporadically, such as the Hebrew , Cyrillic Ш, and Hiragana よ. Uppercase and lowercase letters are considered as different ...