Greek Alphabet in a Jupyter Notebook

Greek Alphabet in a Jupyter Notebook
Greek Alphabet

I often want to use characters from the Greek Alphabet in a Jupyter Notebook, and I’m hoping you do too if you’ve stumbled upon this post.

I often find myself wanting to use a Greek Alphabet character when I’m putting together an article or within a Jupyter notebook. But as I don’t use them too often at the moment I often forget how to.

As a result, I will spend several minutes digging around on the internet for how a particular character is typed in a Jupyter notebook. So, I decided today that I was going to write this down here so I could reference this next time, and hopefully it helps others as well.

Tab completion in a Jupyter notebook

In case you didn’t know Jupyter notebooks have special tab completions for a whole lot of special characters. To use them you simply type \Alpha then hit tab and there you have an \alpha character.

This is pretty simple, and not only does it work in markdown cells but it also works within code cells as well.

The complete Greek alphabet can be seen here, along with a little history about it.

Greek Alphabet Cheat Sheet

\Alpha Α
\Beta Β
\Gamma Γ
\Delta Δ
\Epsilon Ε
\Zeta Ζ
\Eta Η
\Theta Θ
\Iota Ι
\Kappa Κ
\Lambda Λ
\Xi Ξ
\Pi Π
\Rho Ρ
\Sigma Σ
\Tau Τ
\Upsilon Υ
\Phi Φ
\Chi Χ
\Psi Ψ
\Omega Ω
\alpha α
\beta β
\gamma γ
\delta δ
\zeta ζ
\eta η
\theta θ
\iota ι
\kappa κ
\lambda λ
\mu μ
\nu ν
\xi ξ
\pi π
\rho ρ
\varsigma ς
\sigma σ
\tau τ
\upsilon υ
\varphi φ
\chi χ
\psi ψ
\omega ω
\vartheta ϑ
\phi ϕ
\varpi ϖ
\Stigma Ϛ
\Digamma Ϝ
\digamma ϝ
\Koppa Ϟ
\Sampi Ϡ
\varkappa ϰ
\varrho ϱ
\textTheta ϴ
\epsilon ϵ

There are currently 1283 latex symbols that are usable in a Jupyter notebook, I don’t think I will ever get around to using them all but in the event I want find a specific one I now have a source of truth.

Hopefully this post comes in handy to others that are looking to use the Greek Alphabet in a Jupyter Notebook. I often need to use this alphabet when I’m trying to writing machine learning content and I want to use the the actual mathematical equation.

For some examples take a look at my Perceptron or Nearest Neighbors posts with more to come soon!