I cannot remember anyone writing the letter epsilon in any other way than \varepsilon in any math class; but in LaTeX \epsilon and \varepsilon are different symbols. Do any of you know why there are two different symbols? (I.e. if \epsilon is the correct way to write the letter epsilon, why aren't mathematicians using it, and when is, according to the standards today, the correct situation to use each of the symbols?)
2 Answers
Historically there has been a lot of confusion over the two forms, (the situation with \phi and \varphi is similar but even more confused as at one point Unicode swapped the reference glyphs). I added a special section about epsilon to the XML/HTML entities spec
http://www.w3.org/2003/entities/2007doc/#epsilon
The situation in TeX is no different really, different communities used different forms of epsilon and it is rather arbitrary which one gets which name. Unicode (now) calls the curly epsilon "GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON" (ε) (this is a textual Greek letter rather than a math alphabetic symbol) and the symbol that TeX traditionally assigns to \epsilon is called GREEK LUNATE EPSILON SYMBOL (ϵ) the "symbol" being a hint that this is intended as a mathematical character rather than a textual Greek letter.
From Wikipedia:
The lowercase version has two typographical variants, both inherited from medieval Greek handwriting. One, the most common in modern typography and inherited from medieval minuscule, looks like a reversed "3". The other, also known as lunate or uncial epsilon and inherited from earlier uncial writing, looks like a semicircle crossed by a horizontal bar. While in normal typography these are just alternative font variants, they may have different meanings as mathematical symbols. Computer systems therefore offer distinct encodings for them. In Unicode, the character U+03F5 "Greek lunate epsilon symbol" (
ϵ) is provided specifically for the lunate form. In TeX,\epsilon(ϵ) denotes the lunate form, while\varepsilon(ε) denotes the inverted-3 form.
answered Feb 13, 2013 at 11:06
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It is necessary to remark that there are communities that use both, but for different things! (like my community /blushes). This is of course quite confusing and very close to being invalid as a notation.– yo'Commented Feb 13, 2013 at 12:23
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2as noted by @tohecz, some communities use both, for different things. one such use i'm familiar with is that some mathematicians insist on using the lunate epsilon instead of
\in. getting that mixed up in an e-document would be really unfortunate. Commented Jan 14, 2014 at 17:39 -
4In my copy of Kelley's “General Topology”, ‘ɛ’ (not lunate) is used for “belongs to”. I think the lunate one is used in the book for cases like “let ϵ > 0”, which is not so good a notation, in my opinion. That's why the vast majority of mathematicians use a clearly distinct variant ‘∈’ of the lunate epsilon for denoting “belongs to” (bigger, wider and centered to the formula axis).– egregCommented Jan 14, 2014 at 18:26
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And to this day,
unicode-mathhas an option to swap\epsilonand\varepsilon, to support some fonts that do.– DavislorCommented Jan 28, 2019 at 15:29
In the times of typewriters, the \epsilon was used for the metarelation \in. You can see yourself how similar they are. I'm finishing reading Halmos' naive set theory and he uses this epsilon as such, and even calls it an epsilon.
$$doesn't show as math symbols. But you can mark your code with backticks. I don't know the answer, but I use\epsilonfor the Levi-Civita tensor, and\varepsilonfor everything else (of course, renaming both commands).