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Suggestions on how to use standard engineering symbols in Mathematica which conflict with Mathematica own symbols?

• To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
• Subject: [mg104072] Suggestions on how to use standard engineering symbols in Mathematica which conflict with Mathematica own symbols?
• From: "Nasser M. Abbasi" <nma at 12000.org>
• Date: Sun, 18 Oct 2009 05:22:17 -0400 (EDT)
• Reply-to: "Nasser M. Abbasi" <nma at 12000.org>

Hello

This is a problem I am sure all of us had.

It would be nice to use the same standard engineering/physics 
symbols/letters found in textbook to write the equations in mathematica.

But some/many of those symbols conflict with existing Mathemtica symbols. 
For example, Young modulus is always written as E, but E in mathematica is 
reserved to the exponential constant, and I would like to use I (upper case 
I) to mean the moment of inertia, and not have it conflict with complex 
number I. And many other examples.

I was wondering if there is a way to still use these letters in my equations 
but not conflict with Mathematica's?

I thought may be I could make a bold versions of these letters with a new 
code, or find latine characters which "looks like" these from the palette, 
but have different ASCII code.

Or may be I could tell mathematica somehow to "undefine" these symbols 
during some computation and restore them again, so it will not interpret 
them as its own standard symbols only during this computation, but was not 
sure if this is a good idea? (would this will cause a problem internally to 
Mathematica as it could very well use these symbols in its own package code. 
I could always use Exp[] instead of E and use Sqrt[-1] instead of "I" when I 
really mean to use the Mathematica letters and leave E and I etc... for my 
use.

Any other ideas others have on this subject? I'd really like to write the 
equations as they appear in the textbook if possible and not have to rename 
standard engineering letters to something else.

--Nasser

• Follow-Ups:
  • Re: Suggestions on how to use standard engineering symbols
    • From: Leonid Shifrin <lshifr@gmail.com>