[910] in Professors_Quote_Board
Re: Prof Roberge 6.302/16.060
dryfoo@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (dryfoo@ATHENA.MIT.EDU)
Fri Sep 23 16:19:06 1994
I'm guessing they are referring to the "Xi" -- the rogue letter of the
Greek alpha-bet. Except for certain demented text formatters, it doesn't
map to our "X" -- that honor belonging to good old "Chi", as every
statistician will know.
Xi (pronounced like the first syllable in "Xylophone", that is to say,
badly) is one of those renegade Greek letters that hides up in the
mountains and occasionally sneaks down to waylay a hapless professor
or frat pledge on a notational errand who's wandered too far from town.
It's printed more or less as 3 stacked horizontal lines, with the middle
one shorter than the others. The script form is like the script Zeta,
which no one knows how to draw either, but with an additional epi-squiggle.
If you're just bursting with curiousity to see them, start an EZ file
and then type: C-x v gc[ret] and C-x v gC[ret]
I think they can also be found in Dr. Seuss's ground-breaking work on
calligraphy and alphabetology, "On Beyond Zebra"
