Mystery symbols, demystified... Some time ago, while reading a computer science paper, I ran into a mathematical symbol that was new to me: the vertical ellipsis (at right). I had no idea what it meant, and it wasn't at all obvious from the context. I eventually deduced that it was indicating an elision (some things left out), but that was only after much work and hair-pulling (and I don't have a lot of hair to pull!). What was especially frustrating was trying to search for its meaning using Google. Searching for the symbol itself got no results, and I didn't know what the symbol was called (“vertical ellipsis”, it's actual name, never occurred to me).
This morning I stumbled across
a table of mathematical symbols on Wikipedia, which I've now bookmarked as a useful resource...
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