Chapter 8 of "The LaTeX Companion", updated for AMS-LaTeX version 1.2 (Sep. 1st 1997).
Copyright © 1994-97 by Addison Wesley Longman, Inc. All rights reserved.
224 Higher Mathematics
it have the laborsaving abilities of L
A
T
E
X for preparing indexes, bibliographies,
tables, or simple diagrams. These features are such a convenience for authors
that the use of L
A
T
E
X spread rapidly in the mid-1980s (a reasonably mature
version of L
A
T
E
X was available by the end of 1983), and the American Mathe-
matical Society began to be asked by its authors to accept electronic submissions
in L
A
T
E
X.
Thus, the A
M
S-L
A
T
E
X project came into being in 1987 and three years later
A
M
S-L
A
T
E
X version 1.0 was released. The conversion of A
M
S-T
E
X’s mathe-
matical capabilities to L
A
T
E
X, and the integration with the NFSS, were done by
Frank Mittelbach and Rainer Sch¨opf, working as consultants to the AMS, with
assistance from Michael Downes of the AMS technical support staff.
The most often used packages are amsmath (from A
M
S-L
A
T
E
X) and amssymb
(from the AMSFonts distribution). To invoke them in a document you write, e.g.,
\usepackage{amsmath} in the usual way. Installation and usage documentation
is included with the packages. For amssymb the principal piece of documentation
is the AMSFonts User’s Guide (amsfndoc.tex); for amsmath it is the A
M
S-
L
A
T
E
X User’s Guide (amsldoc.tex).
1
8.2 Fonts and Symbols in Formulae
8.2.1 Mathematical Symbols
Tables 8.2 on the next page to 8.11 on page 227 review the mathematical symbols(L 42–47)
available in standard L
A
T
E
X. You can put a slash through a L
A
T
E
Xsymbolby
preceding it with the \not command, for instance.(L 44)
u 6<vor a 6∈ A $u \not< v$ or $a \not\in \mathbf{A}$
Tables 8.12 on page 227 to 8.19 on page 229 show the extra math symbols of
the A
M
S-Fonts, which are automatically available when you specify the amssymb
package.
2
However, if you want to define only some of them (perhaps because
your T
E
X installation has insufficient memory to define all the symbol names),
you can use the amsfonts package and the \DeclareMathSymbol command, which
is explained in section 7.7.6.
1
The AMS distribution also contains a file diff12.tex which describes differences between
version 1.1 and 1.2 of A
M
S-L
A
T
E
X. Note in particular that in versions 1.0 and 1.1 of A
M
S-
L
A
T
E
X, which predated L
A
T
E
X2
ε
,theamsmath package was named “amstex” and included some
of the font-related features that are now separated in the amssymb and amsfonts packages.
2
Note that the Companion uses Lucida math fonts which contain the standard L
A
T
E
Xand
A
M
Ssymbols but with different shapes compared to the Computer Modern math fonts.
