The most basic symbols are the decimal digits (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9), and the letters of the Latin alphabet.
The decimal digits are used for representing numbers through the Hindu–Arabic numeral system.
As the number of these types has increased, the Greek alphabet and some Hebrew letters have also come to be used.
It is commonplace to use alphabets, fonts and typefaces to group symbols by type.
The use of specific Latin and Greek letters as symbols for denoting mathematical objects is not described in this article.
Some take their origin in punctuation marks and diacritics traditionally used in typography; others by deforming letter forms, as in the cases of
Several logical symbols are widely used in all mathematics, and are listed here.
The blackboard bold typeface is widely used for denoting the basic number systems.
A clear advantage of blackboard bold is that these symbols cannot be confused with anything else.
Their meanings depend not only on their shapes, but also on the nature and the arrangement of what is delimited by them, and sometimes what appears between or before them.
For this reason, in the entry titles, the symbol □ is used as a placeholder for schematizing the syntax that underlies the meaning.
In this section, the symbols that are listed are used as some sorts of punctuation marks in mathematical reasoning, or as abbreviations of natural language phrases.
Except for the first two, they are normally not used in printed mathematical texts since, for readability, it is generally recommended to have at least one word between two formulas.