The harp, the instrument after which the nabla symbol is named

Nabla is the symbol . The harp is a Stringed instrument which has the plane of its strings positioned perpendicular to the soundboard. The musical instrument is spelled Cymbal. A symbol is something --- such as an object, Picture, written word a sound a piece The name comes from the Greek word for a Hebrew harp, which had a similar shape. Greek (el ελληνική γλώσσα or simply el ελληνικά — "Hellenic" is an Indo-European language, spoken today by 15-22 million people mainly The harp is a Stringed instrument which has the plane of its strings positioned perpendicular to the soundboard. Related words also exist in Aramaic and Hebrew. Aramaic is a Semitic language with The symbol was first used by William Rowan Hamilton in the form of a sideways wedge: ⊳. Sir William Rowan Hamilton (4 August 1805 &ndash 2 September 1865 was an Irish Mathematician, Physicist, and Astronomer who Another, less-common name for the symbol is atled (delta spelled backwards), because the nabla is an inverted Greek letter delta. The Greek alphabet (Ελληνικό αλφάβητο is a set of twenty-four letters that has been used to write the Greek language since the late 9th or early Delta (uppercase Δ, lowercase δ; Δέλτα Thelta is the fourth letter of the Greek alphabet. In actual Greek usage, the symbol is called ανάδελτα, anádelta, which means "upside-down delta".

The nabla symbol is available in standard HTML as ∇ and in LaTeX as \nabla. LaTeX (ˈleɪtɛ In Unicode, it is the character at code point U+2207, or 8711 in decimal notation. In Computing, Unicode is an Industry standard allowing Computers to consistently represent and manipulate text expressed in most of the world's In Character encoding terminology a code point is any of the numerical values that make up the Codespace. The decimal ( base ten or occasionally denary) Numeral system has ten as its base.

Use in mathematics

Nabla is used in mathematics to denote the del operator. Mathematics is the body of Knowledge and Academic discipline that studies such concepts as Quantity, Structure, Space and &nablaDel It also can refer to a connection in differential geometry, as well as the all relation (most commonly in lattice theory). In Geometry, the notion of a connection (also connexion) makes precise the idea of transporting data along a curve or family of curves in a parallel and Differential geometry is a mathematical discipline that uses the methods of differential and integral Calculus to study problems in Geometry In Mathematics, a lattice is a Partially ordered set (also called a poset) in which every pair of elements has a unique Supremum (the elements' It was introduced by the Irish mathematician and physicist William Rowan Hamilton in 1837 ^[1]. Ireland (pronounced /ˈaɾlənd/ Éire) is the third largest island in Europe, and the twentieth-largest island in the world Sir William Rowan Hamilton (4 August 1805 &ndash 2 September 1865 was an Irish Mathematician, Physicist, and Astronomer who Year 1837 ( MDCCCXXXVII) was a Common year starting on Sunday (link will display the full calendar of the Gregorian Calendar (or a Common W. Thomson wrote in 1884:

"I took the liberty of asking Professor Bell whether he had a name for this symbol and he has mentioned to me nabla, a humorous suggestion of Maxwell's. William Thomson 1st Baron Kelvin (or Lord Kelvin) OM, GCVO, PC, PRS, FRSE, (26 June 1824 &ndash 17 December 1907 It is the name of an Egyptian harp, which was of that shape" ^[2]

In 1901 Gibbs & Wilson wrote:

"This symbolic operator was introduced by Sir W. Josiah Willard Gibbs ( February 11, 1839 &ndash April 28, 1903) was an American theoretical Physicist, Chemist Edwin Bidwell Wilson ( April 25 1879 – December 28 1964) was a Mathematician and Polymath. R. Hamilton and is now in universal employment. There seems, however, to be no universally recognized name for it, although owing to the frequent occurrence of the symbol some name is a practical necessity. It has been found by experience that the monosyllable del is so short and easy to pronounce that even in complicated formulae in which occurs a number of times no inconvenience to the speaker or listener arises from the repetition. V is read simply as 'del V' "^[3]

See also

• Del, the vector differential operator
• Del in cylindrical and spherical coordinates
• grad, div, and curl, differential operators defined using del
• the Covariant derivative, a separate (and tensorial) differential operator defined for tensors

Footnotes

External links

• History of Nabla
• A survey of the improper use of ∇ in vector analysis (1994) Tai, Chen