Math Symbols
Eighty-seven maths characters with the codepoint and official Unicode name each one carries. The notes cover the minus sign that no parser will read as a minus, and two characters in the list that are not maths symbols.
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The operators that carry ordinary arithmetic and calculus
+ ± × ÷ − ∕ for arithmetic; √ ∑ ∏ ∫ ∂ ∇ for the rest of a first course; and ∞ ≈ ≡ ∝ ∠ ∥ for the relations around them. The remaining seventy-odd characters in this set are decorated variants — a plus with a dot below, a multiplication sign inside a triangle, an integral with an overbar — which exist so that a paper needing an operator nobody has taken can have one. Outside the document that defines it, such a character carries no meaning to copy along with it.
The minus sign is not a hyphen, and a parser can tell
− U+2212 MINUS SIGN is a maths operator. The key on your keyboard produces U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS, a different character, and NFKC does not merge the two. Paste −5 into anything that reads numbers and it stays text: in Python, float('-5') is -5.0 while float('−5') raises ValueError. The rule is not Python’s: any parser that expects a leading U+002D takes this character as text instead. If the number has to be read as a number, use the ASCII hyphen; if it only has to be read by a person, − is the character designed for the job.
✕ is in this list and is not the multiplication sign
× U+00D7 MULTIPLICATION SIGN is category Sm, a maths operator. ✕ U+2715 MULTIPLICATION X is category So and belongs to the dingbats — it is the shape used for a close button. The two do not normalise together, so an index built on one will not answer a query for the other, and the Latin letter x is a third character again. Three shapes, three characters, no overlap. The category difference bites elsewhere too: a filter that keeps only Sm — a reasonable way to select “the maths characters” out of a mixed string — keeps × and drops ✕ without reporting anything.
∕ will not act as a separator
∕ U+2215 DIVISION SLASH looks like the ASCII solidus and is not it, and NFKC does not turn it into one. In a path, a URL or a date it is an ordinary character with no structural meaning — which is useful when you want a fraction bar nothing will parse, and a long afternoon when one has found its way into a file path.
What this set does not contain
Equality and comparison are missing. The equals sign is ASCII U+003D and needs no page at all. The negated and ordered relations — U+2260 NOT EQUAL TO, U+2264 LESS-THAN OR EQUAL TO, U+2265 GREATER-THAN OR EQUAL TO — are on inequality symbols, and the membership and inclusion operators are on set theory symbols.
Width and encoding
±, ×, ÷, ∂, ∇, ∏, ∑, ∫, √, ∝, ∞, ∠, ∥, ≈ and ≡ have East Asian width Ambiguous, so a terminal set to render ambiguous characters wide gives each of them two cells; + is Narrow and the operators from U+2A00 upward are Neutral. On encoding, + is ASCII and ±, × and ÷ sit below U+0100, so a latin-1 channel carries those four and nothing else here. The wing index is the maths and science symbols list.