Turned Capital letter L (pointing to the left, with serifs)

[Frédéric Grosshans]

I looked all the pages of the 1809 edition of _Theoria motus corporum
coelestium in sectionibus conicis solem ambientium_
https://archive.org/stream/bub_gb_ORUOAAAAQAAJ where Gauss used this
notation in pages 80-81. Almost all notations are standard enough to be
familiar to any modern (2015) mathematician or physicist, with two
exceptions : this "7" symbol and ☊ U+260A ASCENDING NODE (which is still
standard in astronomy). The Greek letters in particular have a pretty
standard shape, and I don't see why this symbol would be the only geek
letter using a fancy cursive shape. Even the Latin letters used standard
shapes ( italic, roman, a few capital fraktur).

That said,  I did not spot a tau in the text, while most of the Greek
alphabet was used. Could "7" be a standard shape for tau in 1809 Hamburg ?

However, I still think it is a ⦢ U+29A2 TURNED ANGLE

  Frédéric

Le lun 4 janv. 2016 21:38, Raymond Mercier <raymond at almanach.co.uk> a
écrit :

> On further reflection I can well agree that it is tau. The attached images
> from R. Barbour, Greek Literary Hands, show clearly (scan 3) the large
> upper case tau in several lines, and in scan 4 in the first and other lines
> a hooked version of tau. So I withdraw my suggestion of pi.
> Raymond
>
> *From:* Asmus Freytag (t) <asmus-inc at ix.netcom.com>
> *Sent:* Monday, January 04, 2016 7:58 PM
> *To:* unicode at unicode.org
> *Subject:* Re: Turned Capital letter L (pointing to the left, with serifs)
>
> On 1/4/2016 10:41 AM, Michael Everson wrote:
>
> Certainly it does look more like a very common variant of “tau” than “pi”
>
>
> Variant of uppercase tau?
>
> A./
>
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