Math

Unicode includes about 2,000 math and physics symbols, many from preexisting character set standards, APL, and TeX, and many more from a project of the American Mathematical Society. Word processors such as Microsoft Word and OpenOffice Write, and publishing software such as TeX and FrameMaker, provide two general methods for composing mathematical formulae. One is to pick elements from menus and palettes, and place them visually, and the other is to enter codes such as \pi r^2 (area of a circle). Here the code \pi stands for a Greek letter, and the symbol ^ stands for superscript position. Another encoding for mathematics is MathML, a version of XML intended to make equations and other formulae display correctly on Web pages.

Math notation owes much to mathematicians in India and the Muslim world (Hindu-Arabic numerals, zero, and place notation). The great flowering of math symbols occurred in Europe after 1600. Although the relative merits of alphabets and logograms (Chinese, cuneiforms, and hieroglyphs) have been hotly debated, mathematicians are firmly on the side of both.