From: Kent Karlsson (kentk@md.chalmers.se)
Date: Mon Jun 02 2003 - 15:24:44 EDT
Jim Allan wrote:
> Ken Whistler posted:
>
> > And what I pointed
> > out earlier is that, in *linguistic* usage, the slashed zero
> > glyph is clearly an acceptable glyphic variant of the
> > empty set symbol. So to claim it is "completely unrelated"
> > is to manifestly ignore actual practice.
>
> Indeed.
It is not the origin of this character. Even though of course there
are OTHER relationships between the empty set (not the symbol)
and zero.
> Donald Knuth, a mathematician and author of books on programming,
...
> He used the slashed 0 for the empty set symbol in his cmsy10 font for
> mathematics.
Yes... A horrible glyph for denoting the empty set, if I may say so.
No
offence intended. Please use the glyph available via the command
\varnothing (a misleading name...) in the amssymb package; or simply a
capital o with stroke (U+00D8; upright or italic) to denote the empty
set.
(Note that TeX is "glyph code oriented"; not really character oriented.)
It would have been much better if it had been stated explicitly when
this notation for the empty set was introduced that they were using
the Norwegian letter for this, just as (quite ordinary) greek small pi
and ordinary e, is used to denote specific mathematical entities.
But alas, that was not the case, and as a result we see an unfortunate
divergence in notation.
/kent k
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