In a message dated 2002-01-19 9:33:46 Pacific Standard Time,
palais@math.utah.edu writes:
>> Has there been any consideration of practical alternatives, such as
>>selecting a lookalike or similar character from the plethora of those
>>already encoded and promoting its use to represent the "newpi"
>> character?
>
> My own proposal was a pictogram: A circle with a radius to "3 o'clock",
> i.e. from 0 to 1 in the complex number plane. Pacman with mouth closed.
> Does that already exist in Unicode? :-) My dad's version is a lot more
> palatable for most people.
A large number of glyphic variations of Latin and Greek letters were just
added to Unicode 3.1 with the sole purpose of serving as mathematical
identifiers. Apparently it was stressed by the AMS and others that these
variations (bold, italic, double-struck, sans serif, etc.) are all
significant and distinct in math notation. Could one of these characters,
already approved and part of Unicode, be adopted to represent 2pi?
In particular, consider the following already-encoded variants of pi:
U+1D6B7 MATHEMATICAL BOLD CAPITAL PI
U+1D6D1 MATHEMATICAL BOLD SMALL PI
U+1D6E1 MATHEMATICAL BOLD PI SYMBOL
U+1D6F1 MATHEMATICAL ITALIC CAPITAL PI
U+1D70B MATHEMATICAL ITALIC SMALL PI
U+1D71B MATHEMATICAL ITALIC PI SYMBOL
U+1D72B MATHEMATICAL BOLD ITALIC CAPITAL PI
U+1D745 MATHEMATICAL BOLD ITALIC SMALL PI
U+1D755 MATHEMATICAL BOLD ITALIC PI SYMBOL
U+1D765 MATHEMATICAL SANS-SERIF BOLD CAPITAL PI
U+1D77F MATHEMATICAL SANS-SERIF BOLD SMALL PI
U+1D78F MATHEMATICAL SANS-SERIF BOLD PI SYMBOL
U+1D79F MATHEMATICAL SANS-SERIF BOLD ITALIC CAPITAL PI
U+1D7B9 MATHEMATICAL SANS-SERIF BOLD ITALIC SMALL PI
U+1D7C9 MATHEMATICAL SANS-SERIF BOLD ITALIC PI SYMBOL
Now, it may well be that a typographical variant of pi is not the best choice
to represent (2 * pi). That's OK, there are still hundreds more of these
math-specific characters to choose from.
-Doug Ewell
Fullerton, California
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