Nu (letter) - Wikipedia

Thirteenth letter in the Greek alphabet For other uses, see Nu (disambiguation). Not to be confused with Mu (letter), N, En (Cyrillic), Ͷ (Greek), И (Cyrillic), or v.

Nu (/ˈnjuː/ ⓘ; uppercase Ν, lowercase ν; Greek: vι ni, [ni]) is the thirteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, representing the voiced alveolar nasal [n]. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 50. It is derived from the Phoenician nun . Its Latin equivalent is N, though the lowercase ( ν {\displaystyle \nu } ) resembles the Roman lowercase v.

The name of the letter is νῦ (nû, [nŷː]) in Ancient Greek, while in Modern Greek it is νι (ni, [ni]).

Letters that arose from nu include N in the Latin script and En (Н) in Cyrillic.

Symbology

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The lower-case letter ν is used as a symbol in many academic fields. Uppercase nu is not used, because it appears identical to Latin N.

• Mathematics:
  • Degrees of freedom in statistics.
  • The greatest fixed point of a function, as commonly used in the μ-calculus.
  • Free names of a process, as used in the π-calculus.
  • One of the Greeks in mathematical finance, known as "vega".
  • The reciprocal of 1 plus the interest rate in finance.
  • The p-adic valuation or p-adic order of a number.
• Physics:
  • Kinematic viscosity in fluid mechanics.[1]
  • The frequency[2] of a wave in physics and other fields; sometimes also spatial frequency; wavenumber
  • The specific volume in thermodynamics.
  • Poisson's ratio, the ratio of strains perpendicular with and parallel with an applied force.
  • Any of three kinds of neutrino in particle physics.
  • The number of neutrons released per fission of an atom in nuclear physics.
  • Molecular vibrational mode, νx where x is the number of the vibration (a label).
  • The true anomaly, an angular parameter that defines the position of a body moving along an orbit (see orbital elements).
• Biology:
  • A DNA polymerase found in higher eukaryotes and implicated in translesion synthesis.
• Chemistry:
  • The stoichiometric coefficient.
• Psychology:
  • The maximum conditioning possible for an unconditioned stimulus in the Rescorla-Wagner model.

Unicode

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Encodings of Greek Nu and Coptic Ni.[3]

• U+039D Ν GREEK CAPITAL LETTER NU (Ν)
• U+03BD ν GREEK SMALL LETTER NU (ν) (\nu in TeX)
• U+2C9A Ⲛ COPTIC CAPITAL LETTER NI
• U+2C9B ⲛ COPTIC SMALL LETTER NI
• U+1D6B4 𝚴 MATHEMATICAL BOLD CAPITAL NU[a]
• U+1D6CE 𝛎 MATHEMATICAL BOLD SMALL NU
• U+1D6EE 𝛮 MATHEMATICAL ITALIC CAPITAL NU
• U+1D708 𝜈 MATHEMATICAL ITALIC SMALL NU
• U+1D728 𝜨 MATHEMATICAL BOLD ITALIC CAPITAL NU
• U+1D742 𝝂 MATHEMATICAL BOLD ITALIC SMALL NU
• U+1D762 𝝢 MATHEMATICAL SANS-SERIF BOLD CAPITAL NU
• U+1D77C 𝝼 MATHEMATICAL SANS-SERIF BOLD SMALL NU
• U+1D79C 𝞜 MATHEMATICAL SANS-SERIF BOLD ITALIC CAPITAL NU
• U+1D7B6 𝞶 MATHEMATICAL SANS-SERIF BOLD ITALIC SMALL NU

1. ^ The MATHEMATICAL symbols should only be use for math. Stylized Greek text should be encoded using the normal Greek letters, with markup and formatting to indicate text style.

See also

[edit] Look up Ν or ν in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Movable nu

References

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1. ^ Elert, Glenn (2023), "Special Symbols", The Physics Hypertextbook, hypertextbook, retrieved 2025-02-01, ν kinematic viscosity
2. ^ See e.g. Planck's formula
3. ^ Unicode Code Charts: Greek and Coptic (Range: 0370-03FF)

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