My question then, is have there been any strong mainstream efforts, perhaps through using them in books, or from directly advocating them in lectures or articles, to introduce characters from other alphabets into mathematics? If there have been, why have they failed, and if there haven't been, why is it generally seen as unnecessary? The only example I can think of offhand of a non Greek or Latin character that has mainstream acceptance in mathematics would be the Hebrew character aleph ($\aleph$), though perhaps there are more.
It then seems strange to me that there's been no effort to introduce additional alphabets into mathematics, two obvious ones, for their visual clarity, would be Norse runes or Japanese katakana. "Oh, I cannot use B for this matrix, that's the magnetic field".Įven ignoring the many letters used for common physical concepts, it seems most of the usual Greek and Latin letters already have connotations that would make their usage for other purposes potentially confusing, for instance one would associate $p$ and $q$ with integer arguments, $i,j,k$ with indices or quaternians, $\delta$ and $\varepsilon$ with small values, $w$ with complex numbers and $A$ and $B$ with matrices, and so forth.
As a physics student, often I find when doing blackboard problems, the lecturer will struggle to find a good variable name for a variable e.g.