Epsilon

Template:Short description Template:Distinguish Template:About Template:Use dmy dates Template:Greek Alphabet Template:Orthography notation Epsilon (Template:IPAc-en,<ref>Template:Cite encyclopedia</ref> Template:IPAc-en;<ref>Template:Cite OED</ref> uppercase Template:Lang, lowercase Template:Lang or Template:Lang; Template:Langx) is the fifth letter of the Greek alphabet, corresponding phonetically to a mid front unrounded vowel Template:IPA or Template:IPA. In the system of Greek numerals it also has the value five. It was derived from the Phoenician letter He He. Letters that arose from epsilon include the Roman E, Ë and Ɛ, and Cyrillic Е, È, Ё, Є and Э. The name of the letter was originally Template:Lang (Template:IPA), but it was later changed to Template:Wikt-lang (Template:Lang 'simple e') in the Middle Ages to distinguish the letter from the digraph Template:Lang, a former diphthong that had come to be pronounced the same as epsilon.

The uppercase form of epsilon is identical to Latin Template:Angbr but has its own code point in Unicode: Template:Unichar. The lowercase version has two typographical variants, both inherited from medieval Greek handwriting. One, the most common in modern typography and inherited from medieval minuscule, looks like a reversed number "3" and is encoded Template:Unichar. The other, also known as lunate or uncial epsilon and inherited from earlier uncial writing,<ref name="nicholas1">Nick Nicholas: Letters Template:Webarchive, 2003–2008. (Greek Unicode Issues)</ref><ref name="colwell">Template:Cite book</ref> looks like a semicircle crossed by a horizontal bar: it is encoded Template:Unichar. While in normal typography these are just alternative font variants, they may have different meanings as mathematical symbols: computer systems therefore offer distinct encodings for them.<ref name="nicholas1"/> In TeX, \epsilon ( <math>\epsilon\!</math> ) denotes the lunate form, while \varepsilon ( <math>\varepsilon</math> ) denotes the epsilon number. Unicode versions 2.0.0 and onwards use Template:Char as the lowercase Greek epsilon letter,<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> but in version 1.0.0, Template:Char was used.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> The lunate or uncial epsilon provided inspiration for the euro sign, Template:Char.<ref name="ec.europa.eu">Template:Cite web</ref>

There is also a 'Latin epsilon', Template:Angbr or "open e", which looks similar to the Greek lowercase epsilon. It is encoded in Unicode as Template:Unichar and Template:Unichar and is used as an IPA phonetic symbol. This Latin uppercase epsilon, Template:Char, is not to be confused with the Greek uppercase Template:Char (sigma)

The lunate epsilon, Template:Angbr, is not to be confused with the set membership symbol Template:Char. The symbol <math>\in</math>, first used in set theory and logic by Giuseppe Peano and now used in mathematics in general for set membership ("belongs to"), evolved from the letter epsilon, since the symbol was originally used as an abbreviation for the Latin word Template:Lang. In addition, mathematicians often read the symbol Template:Char as "element of", as in "1 is an element of the natural numbers" for <math>1\in\N</math>, for example. As late as 1960, Template:Char itself was used for set membership, while its negation "does not belong to" (now Template:Char) was denoted by Template:Char (epsilon prime).<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> Only gradually did a fully separate, stylized symbol take the place of epsilon in this role. In a related context, Peano also introduced the use of a backwards epsilon, Template:Char, for the phrase "such that", although the abbreviation s.t. is occasionally used in place of Template:Char in informal cardinals.

History

Origin

The letter Template:Angbr was adopted from the Phoenician letter He (A letter that looks like a capital E with arms pointing left instead of right) when Greeks first adopted alphabetic writing. In archaic Greek writing, its shape is often still identical to that of the Phoenician letter. Like other Greek letters, it could face either leftward or rightward (inlineinline), depending on the current writing direction, but, just as in Phoenician, the horizontal bars always faced in the direction of writing. Archaic writing often preserves the Phoenician form with a vertical stem extending slightly below the lowest horizontal bar. In the classical era, through the influence of more cursive writing styles, the shape was simplified to the current Template:Angbr glyph.<ref name="jeffery63">Template:Cite book</ref>

Sound value

While the original pronunciation of the Phoenician letter He was Template:IPA, the earliest Greek sound value of Ε was determined by the vowel occurring in the Phoenician letter name, which made it a natural choice for being reinterpreted from a consonant symbol to a vowel symbol denoting an Template:IPA sound.<ref name="jeffery24">Jeffery, Local Scripts of Archaic Greece, p. 24.</ref> Besides its classical Greek sound value, the short Template:IPA phoneme, it could initially also be used for other Template:IPA-like sounds. For instance, in early Attic before Template:Circa, it was used also both for the long, open Template:IPA, and for the long close Template:IPA. In the former role, it was later replaced in the classic Greek alphabet by Eta (Template:Angbr), which was taken over from eastern Ionic alphabets, while in the latter role it was replaced by the digraph ⟨ΕΙ⟩.

Epichoric alphabets

Some dialects used yet other ways of distinguishing between various e-like sounds.

In Corinth, the normal function of Template:Angbr to denote Template:IPA and Template:IPA was taken by a glyph resembling a pointed B (inline), while Template:Angbr was used only for long close Template:IPA.<ref name="jeffery114">Jeffery, Local Scripts of Archaic Greece, p. 114.</ref> The letter Beta, in turn, took the deviant shape inline.

In Sicyon, a variant glyph resembling an Template:Angbr (inline) was used in the same function as Corinthian inline.<ref name="jeffery138">Jeffery, Local Scripts of Archaic Greece, p. 138.</ref>

In Thespiai (Boeotia), a special letter form consisting of a vertical stem with a single rightward-pointing horizontal bar (inline) was used for what was probably a raised variant of Template:IPA in pre-vocalic environments.<ref name="nicholas2">Template:Cite web</ref><ref name="jeffery89">Jeffery, Local Scripts of Archaic Greece, p. 89.</ref> This tack glyph was used elsewhere also as a form of "Heta", i.e. for the sound Template:IPA.

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Glyph variants

After the establishment of the canonical Ionian (Euclidean) Greek alphabet, new glyph variants for Ε were introduced through handwriting. In the uncial script (used for literary papyrus manuscripts in late antiquity and then in early medieval vellum codices), the "lunate" shape (inline) became predominant. In cursive handwriting, a large number of shorthand glyphs came to be used, where the cross-bar and the curved stroke were linked in various ways.<ref name="thompson">Template:Cite book</ref> Some of them resembled a modern lowercase Latin "e", some a "6" with a connecting stroke to the next letter starting from the middle, and some a combination of two small "c"-like curves. Several of these shapes were later taken over into minuscule book hand. Of the various minuscule letter shapes, the inverted-3 form became the basis for lower-case Epsilon in Greek typography during the modern era.

Uncial	Uncial variants	Cursive variants	Minuscule	Minuscule with ligatures
inline	inline	inline	inline	inline

Uses

International Phonetic Alphabet

Despite its pronunciation as mid, in the International Phonetic Alphabet, the Latin epsilon Template:IPAc-en represents open-mid front unrounded vowel, as in the English word pet Template:IPAc-en.

Symbol

The uppercase Epsilon is not commonly used outside of the Greek language because of its similarity to the Latin letter E. However, it is commonly used in structural mechanics with Young's Modulus equations for calculating tensile, compressive and areal strain.

The Greek lowercase epsilon Template:Code, the lunate epsilon symbol Template:Code, and the Latin lowercase epsilon Template:Code (see above) are used in a variety of places:

In engineering mechanics, strain calculations ϵ = increase of length / original length. Usually this relates to extensometer testing of metallic materials.
In mathematics
- (In early calculus or nonstandard analysis) An infinitesimally small positive quantity is commonly denoted ε.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
  - (In analysis) By extension, a quantity thought of as "small", "negligible", or, especially, "arbitrarily small", is often denoted ε. For instance, quantities subject to a limit which takes them towards zero are often denoted ε; see (ε, δ)-definition of limit.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
- Hilbert introduced epsilon terms <math>\epsilon x.\phi</math> as an extension to first-order logic; see epsilon calculus.
- it is used to represent the Levi-Civita symbol.
- it is used to represent dual numbers: <math>a+b \varepsilon</math>, with <math>\varepsilon^{2}=0</math> and <math>\varepsilon \neq 0</math>.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
- it is sometimes used to denote the Heaviside step function.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
- in set theory, the epsilon numbers are ordinal numbers that satisfy the fixed point ε = ω^ε. The first epsilon number, ε₀, is the limit ordinal of the set {ω, ω^ω, ω^{ω^ω}, ...}.
- in numerical analysis and statistics it is used as the error term
- in group theory it is used as the idempotent group when e is in use as a variable name
In computer science
- it often represents the empty string, though different writers use a variety of other symbols for the empty string as well; usually the lower-case Greek letter lambda (λ).
- the machine epsilon indicates the upper bound on the relative error due to rounding in floating point arithmetic.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
In physics,
- it indicates the permittivity of a medium; with the subscript 0 (ε₀) it is the permittivity of free space.<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>
- it can also indicate the strain of a material (a ratio of extensions).<ref>Template:Citation</ref>
- in quantum field theory, it usually indicates the dimensional regularization parameter.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
In automata theory, it shows a transition that involves no shifting of an input symbol.
In astronomy,
- it stands for the fifth-brightest star in a constellation (see Bayer designation).
- Epsilon is the name for the most distant and most visible ring of Uranus.
- In planetary science, ε denotes the axial tilt.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
In chemistry, it represents the molar extinction coefficient of a chromophore.
In economics, ε refers to elasticity.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
In statistics,
- it is used to refer to error terms.
- it also can to refer to the degree of sphericity in repeated measures ANOVAs.
In agronomy, it is used to represent the "photosynthetic efficiency" of a particular plant or crop.

Unicode

For accented Greek characters, see Greek diacritics: Computer encoding.

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Initial

Initial epsilon in Lectionary 226, folio 20 verso

Initial epsilon in Lectionary 226, folio 20 verso
folio 64 verso

folio 64 verso
folio 125 verso

folio 125 verso

References

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