Unicode

Unicode is a universal character encoding standard used across operating systems and the web, facilitating the representation of text for all languages. Since math is a language commonly entered into computers, this website uses the standard for its math symbol resources.

Each character in the Unicode standard is described by a code point which is a hexadecimal value that uniquely identifies the character. This website lists the Unicode code point for each math symbol, where U+ prefix is used to indicate that the hexadecimal value is a Unicode code point. For example, the (pi) symbol has the code point shown below.

U+03C0

The standard is a variable-width format meaning that code points are encoded differently depending on the format. For example, the format UTF-8 encodes Unicode characters using one to four bytes, depending on the code point and UTF-16 encodes characters using one or two 16-bit units.

It’s important to note that while we provide the Unicode code points for math symbols, the actual byte sequence used to represent each symbol in UTF-8 or UTF-16 encoding will vary based on the character.

Sometimes you’ll see combining characters from the Unicode standard used to combine two glyphs into a new character. For example, the (x bar) symbol is a combination of the Latin small letter x (U+0078) and the combining macron character (U+0304). This is illustrated in the diagram below.

While this works in some cases, typically math expressions are rendered using a typesetting system like TeX which allows for much more expressive statements.

TeX

TeX is a popular typesetting system for authoring technical documents and math expressions. It allows for precise control over the layout and appearance of documents.