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. By providing uniformity over numerous mathematical articles and books, these conventions help to read mathematical formulas. These also may be used to differentiate between concepts that share a letter in a single problem.
Unicode includes many such symbols (in the range U+1D400–U+1D7FF). The rationale behind this is that it enables design and usage of special mathematical characters (fonts) that include all necessary properties to differentiate from other alphanumerics, e.g. in mathematics an italic letter "A" can have a different meaning from a roman letter "A". Unicode originally included a limited set of such letter forms in its Letterlike Symbols block before completing the set of Latin and Greek letter forms in this block beginning in version 3.1.
Unicode expressly recommends that these characters not be used in general text as a substitute for presentational markup;[3] the letters are specifically designed to be semantically different from each other. Unicode does not include a set of normal serif letters in the set.[a] Still they have found some usage on social media, for example by people who want a stylized user name,[4] and in email spam, in an attempt to bypass filters.
All these letter shapes may be manipulated with MathML's attribute mathvariant.
These tables show all styled forms of Latin and Greek letters, symbols, and digits in the Unicode Standard.
The first column labelled as "serif normal" is in fact non-symbol letters from the BMP. These will not have serifs if the font is non-serif, this table selects a serif font for them.
In most cases the code point is the sum of the index number on the left and the number at the top of the column. Pink and yellow cells and '-' index indicates this rule does not apply.
Latin letters
The 24 characters with pink backgrounds are not in the Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols block, but instead in the BMP letterlike symbols block, for example, ℛ (script capital r) is at U+211B rather than the expected U+1D4AD which is reserved. In the code charts for the Unicode Standard, the reserved code points corresponding to the pink cell are annotated with the name and code point of the correct character.[5] There are a few characters which have names that suggest that they should belong in the tables below, but in fact do not because their official character names are misnomers:
U+2113ℓSCRIPT SMALL L; "despite its character name, this symbol is derived from a special italicized version of the small letter l".[6] It has various other specialized uses, such as a liter symbol and as the azimuthal quantum number symbol.
Aliprand, Joan (1999-02-05), "Mathematical Symbols", Approved Minutes -- UTC #78 & NCITS Subgroup L2 # 175 Joint Meeting, San Jose, CA -- December 1-4, 1998
Anderson, Deborah; Whistler, Ken; Pournader, Roozbeh; Moore, Lisa; Liang, Hai (2021-01-14), "25 Math Calligraphic Alphabets", Recommendations to UTC #166 January 2021 on Script Proposals
Moore, Lisa (2021-01-27), "Consensus 166-C33", UTC #166 Minutes, The UTC accepts 52 variation sequences to distinguish roundhand and chancery style mathematical script alphabetic characters
"Consensus 186-C32", UTC #186 Minutes, 2026-02-01, UTC accepts the variation sequence 1D4CF FE02 "kurrent style" for base character 1D4CF MATHEMATICAL SCRIPT SMALL Z
"Consensus 186-C31", UTC #186 Minutes, 2026-02-01, UTC accepts [...] Cossic characters for encoding in Unicode 18.0 ...
↑Unicode thus assumes a given font is a serif by default; a sans-serif font that supports the range would thus display the standard letters and the "sans-serif" symbols identically but could not display normal serif symbols of the same.
↑Proposed code points and characters names may differ from final code points and names
↑Refer to the history section of the Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-B block for additional math-related documents
You are visitor 01402503 — GeezerVison does not store the pages you look up. Best viewed with Netscape Navigator 4.7 or Internet Explorer 6 at 800×600. No cookies required.
