Greek Letter Symbols
The Greek letters that turn up alone in maths and physics, grouped by what each is used to denote, with the real codepoint and Unicode name for each. The notes cover why a formula often needs the italic maths forms instead.
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Unicode gives these letters no mathematical meaning
Every character above is a letter of the Greek script and nothing more — category Lu or Ll, with a case mapping, exactly like a Latin letter. The reading comes from the document, not from Unicode. The grid gives the conventional one in maths and physics; a text that defines a letter differently overrides it.
Σ is a letter. The summation sign is not.
Σ U+03A3 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER SIGMA is category Lu, an uppercase letter that lowercases to σ. The summation operator is a different character, U+2211 N-ARY SUMMATION, category Sm, with no case at all. The same split runs through the set: Π U+03A0 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER PI against U+220F N-ARY PRODUCT, and Δ U+0394 GREEK CAPITAL LETTER DELTA against U+2206 INCREMENT. Paste the letter where the operator belongs and nothing visibly breaks — but anything that treats letters differently from symbols now has a letter: a case-insensitive search folds it against its own capital, and a validator that permits letters lets it through.
Two unit signs collapse into these letters
U+00B5 MICRO SIGN and U+2126 OHM SIGN are separate characters drawn like μ and Ω. NFKC rewrites the micro sign into μ U+03BC. The ohm sign goes further: plain NFC, the weaker normalisation that changes almost nothing else here, rewrites U+2126 into Ω U+03A9. Store an ohm sign, retrieve a capital omega. It never runs the other way: the letters normalise to themselves, so the letter is the safer character to store.
A maths page needs the italic forms, and this set does not have them
In typeset maths a variable is italic while an operator name or a unit stays upright: the δ in a derivative is meant to look different from the δ in the word delta. Plain text has no italics, so Unicode encodes the maths italics as their own characters, in a block that begins at U+1D6FC MATHEMATICAL ITALIC SMALL ALPHA — U+1D6FF is MATHEMATICAL ITALIC SMALL DELTA and U+1D70E is MATHEMATICAL ITALIC SMALL SIGMA. None of them is in the set generated for this page.
Two consequences follow, and they favour the plain letter. Each italic form sits above U+FFFF, so in UTF-16 it costs two code units: a field with a twenty-character limit counts one italic alpha as two. And NFKC maps every one of them straight back to the plain letter — U+1D6FF becomes δ U+03B4 — so any destination that normalises destroys exactly the distinction you went out of your way to encode. Use the maths italics in a document nothing else processes; use the letters above anywhere a search has to find them again.
The variant letterforms are not here either
Maths treats some alternate shapes as separate symbols, and Unicode encodes them separately: U+03D1 GREEK THETA SYMBOL, U+03D5 GREEK PHI SYMBOL, U+03D6 GREEK PI SYMBOL, U+03F1 GREEK RHO SYMBOL and U+03F5 GREEK LUNATE EPSILON SYMBOL. They are not in this set, and NFKC folds each of them back to the plain letter, so they carry the same risk as the italics. One spelling trap while you look: λ is U+03BB GREEK SMALL LETTER LAMDA, no B, so a name lookup for LAMBDA comes back empty.
The wing index is the maths and science symbols list. If you want the alphabet as a set rather than one letter for what it denotes — in order, both cases, with the accented forms Greek writing needs — that is greek alphabet symbols. The operators these letters appear beside are on math symbols.