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philh comments on Open Thread, Apr. 20 - Apr. 26, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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My goal is for a relatively simple, even iconic, image or logo, which can be easily interpreted regardless of the viewer's language. The symbol for Phi - a circle with a line through it - provides fodder for as much interpretation as I desire, from the overlapped 1 and 0 of binary to an ouroborus to an axis-and-equator to the Golden Ratio - and if a minimal modification can explicitly add the "maximum value of the variable denoted by this symbol", I'll be a happy little rat indeed.
This page suggests "∨".
(I've only ever seen that symbol meaning "or", but that's a kind of maximum.)
That's one of the two possibilities I've found over the past day. The other is ⊤ from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greatest_element .
(I wonder if presenting this idea to an actual mathematician would induce any wincing? Off to /r/math to find out...)
∨ is the mathematical symbol for "or" (in logic) -- my guess is that it may be derived from the fact that the initial letter of the Latin word for "or" is "v". There's a kinda convention that when you have a(n associative) binary operator, you use a bigger version of it to signify applying it to all the things in a sequence or set, so you'd want a larger one -- a bit like a capital "V".
⊤ is the mathematical symbol for the "top" element of a Boolean algebra; maybe more generally of a lattice. You wouldn't use it to mean "maximum of these things" in general.