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Delta (/ ˈ d ɛ l t ə / DEL-tə; [1] uppercase Δ, lowercase δ; Greek: δέλτα, délta, ) [2] is the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet. In the system of Greek numerals, it has a value of four. It was derived from the Phoenician letter dalet 𐤃. [3] Letters that come from delta include the Latin D and the Cyrillic Д.
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. In these contexts, the capital letters and the small letters represent distinct and unrelated entities.
Historically, upper-case letters were used for representing points in geometry, and lower-case letters were used for variables and constants. Letters are used for representing many other types of mathematical object. As the number of these types has increased, the Greek alphabet and some Hebrew letters have also come to be used.
The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early 8th century BC. [2] [3] It was derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, [4] and is the earliest known alphabetic script to have developed distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants. [5]
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.
The definition of a Latin-script letter for this list is a character encoded in the Unicode Standard that has a script property of 'Latin' and the general category of 'Letter'. An overview of the distribution of Latin-script letters in Unicode is given in Latin script in Unicode .
The nabla is a triangular symbol resembling an inverted Greek delta: [1] or ∇. The name comes, by reason of the symbol's shape, from the Hellenistic Greek word νάβλα for a Phoenician harp, [2] [3] and was suggested by the encyclopedist William Robertson Smith in an 1870 letter to Peter Guthrie Tait.
The descenders were borrowed from a Byzantine uncial shape of uppercase Delta. De, like the Cyrillic letter El, has two typographical variants: an older variant where its top is pointed (like Delta), and a modern one (first used in mid-19th-century fonts) where it is square. Nowadays, almost all books and magazines are printed with fonts with ...