 | This article is rated Start-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||
| |||||||||||
Untitled 2009 topic
editWhat on earth is this symbol called? --BiT (talk) 03:10, 2 April 2009 (UTC)
- Depends on its usage. It's actually quite confusing as it's used for two different things, both related to multi-variable calculus. (partial derivative and boundary) TFighterPilot (talk) 14:28, 2 February 2011 (UTC)
Talking to people in my PDE's class (including professor), people called it "del", "partial", and "der". I can't find a citation for "der" because, interestingly enough, everybody online that calls it a der quotes a previous version of this article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.91.53.166 (talk) 18:39, 30 September 2013 (UTC) The Unicode page for it calls it a "U+2202 'Partial Differential'".
- Please don't add pronunciations for which you can't find a citation. See Wikipedia:Verifiability for details. Melchoir (talk) 19:44, 30 September 2013 (UTC)
- In India, it is mostly called as "doh", at least since a few decades. Which is quite convenient IMHO, as it clearly and easily differentiates against the other common use of "del" for Nabla symbol. Sahrudayan (talk) 07:35, 18 November 2018 (UTC)
Disambiguation page
editThis article should be, and already is without the disambig page... I made it one. Maschen (talk) 09:12, 24 August 2012 (UTC)
Relation to Greek letter delta
editI very much doubt that this symbol was actually used in any Greek font before modern times. It is very tempting to explain it this way, but since there is no reference given and the article Delta_(letter) say otherwise in the "See also" section ("sometimes mistaken for a lowercase Greek letter Delta"), I would recommend that this predication be deleted until a citation can be given. --195.81.5.154 (talk) 09:27, 14 November 2013 (UTC)
Relation to Cyrillic letter de
editThe article now claims this symbol is an italic Cyrillic de. The source (http://jeff560.tripod.com/calculus.html) says it “corresponds to the cursive "dey" (equivalent to our d) in the Cyrillic alphabet”, but that does not mean it is derived from the Cyrillic letter. Furthermore, it seems unlikely that French and German mathematicians would have adopted a Cyrillic letter; a simpler explanation is that they modified the Latin d. I recommend removing any explanation of its origin until a source is found that unambiguously explains its origin. Gorobay (talk) 18:38, 16 January 2014 (UTC)
- I've edited the article so that it doesn't attempt to explain the symbol's origin. Ozob (talk) 03:42, 17 January 2014 (UTC)