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I have this problem frequently in math. Someone will decide to use some new symbol and you want to add it to your notes but without the name this has proven difficult. In my case, I'm currently reading a book on machine learning and ran across this:

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Is there a good generalized way to find out the names of these (sometimes obscure) mathematical symbols? I just Wikipedia Greek letters and if it's not there I'm never sure where to look after.

PS: Willing to update the tags - couldn't find a good one to fit the question.

Blue
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Grant Curell
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1 Answers1

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The site detexify is frequently useful. It's not perfect, but it's saved me a lot of time. Also, there are fairly complete symbol lists out there for LaTeX - see e.g. here - but these lack detexify's "uninformed search" aspect.

That said, one important point is to distinguish between new symbols and different fonts; e.g. in the example you give, that's just a fraktur letter "L" (which you can tex as "\mathfrak{L}," in math mode as usual) - compare with e.g. $\mathbb{L}$, $\mathcal{L}$, and $\mathsf{L}$. This tex.stackexchange question is a good source for these.

Noah Schweber
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