Girish Mahajan (Editor)

Kappa

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Kappa (uppercase Κ, lowercase κ or cursive ϰ; Greek: κάππα, káppa) is the 10th letter of the Greek alphabet, used to represent the /k/ sound in Ancient and Modern Greek. In the system of Greek numerals, has a value of 20. It was derived from the Phoenician letter kaph . Letters that arose from kappa include the Roman K and Cyrillic К.

Greek proper names and placenames containing kappa are often written in English with "c" due to the Romans' transliterations into the Latin alphabet: Constantinople, Corinth, Crete. All formal modern romanizations of Greek now use the letter "k", however: Thessaloniki, Kalamata, Nikaia.

The cursive form ϰ is generally a simple font variant of lower-case kappa, but it is encoded separately in Unicode for occasions where it is used as a separate symbol in math and science. In mathematics, the kappa curve is named after this letter; the tangents of this curve were first calculated by Isaac Barrow in the 17th century.

Symbol

  • In graph theory, the connectivity of a graph is given by κ.
  • In differential geometry, the curvature of a curve is given by κ.
  • In Cosmology, the curvature of the universe is described by κ.
  • In physics, the torsional constant of an oscillator is given by κ as well as Einstein's constant of gravitation.
  • In physics the coupling coefficient in magnetostatics is represented by κ
  • In fluid dynamics, the von Kármán constant is represented by κ.
  • In structural engineering, κ is the ratio of the smaller factored moment to the larger factored moment and is used to calculate the critical elastic moment of an unbraced steel member.
  • In electrical engineering, κ is the multiplication factor, a function of the R/X ratio of the equivalent power system network, which is used in calculating the peak short-circuit current of a system fault. κ is also used to notate conductivity, the reciprocal of resistivity, rho.
  • In Thermodynamics, the compressibility of a compound is given by κ.
  • In psychology and psychiatry, kappa represents a measure of diagnostic reliability.
  • In biology, kappa and kappa prime are important nucleotide motifs for a tertiary interaction of group II introns.
  • In biology, kappa designates a subtype of an antibody component.
  • In pharmacology, kappa represents a type of opioid receptor.
  • Kappa statistics such as Cohen's kappa and Fleiss' kappa are methods for calculating inter-rater reliability.
  • Upper-case letter Κ is used as a symbol for:

  • In textual criticism, the Byzantine text-type (from Κοινη, Koine, the common text).
  • In set theory, kappa is often used to denote an ordinal that is also a cardinal.
  • In Chemistry, kappa is used to denote the denticity of the compound.
  • Mathematical Kappa
  • These characters are used only as mathematical symbols. Stylized Greek text should be encoded using the normal Greek letters, with markup and formatting to indicate text style.

    References

    Kappa Wikipedia


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