Who or what is named character Andy?

Question

I suspect \[Andy] was meant to represent a staff member, or at least a person of importance. I tried the F1-"Wolfram Search", Wolfram|Alpha and a simple mathematica.SE & Google search.

Can somebody please tell me why \[Andy] is a named character in Mathematica?

My installation is on version 11.3

This much I can say: the character being used corresponds to f729 in Unicode, which is a private use character. You can confirm this by typing \:f729 in a notebook and using FullForm[] on the result. — J. M.'s missing motivation, Mar 17 '19 at 13:52
They also have \[Spooky], \[Villa], and \[Akuz]. Perhaps long forgotten Easter Eggs, I'm not sure. I can't seem to infer any meaning from them, nor am I aware of any higher ups at WRI named Andy... Maybe if there was a \[SW] or \[Stephen]... — ktm, Mar 17 '19 at 14:22
FWIW I tested all the way back to 5.2 and this character has existed since then. — Greg Hurst, Mar 17 '19 at 23:59

flip · Accepted Answer · 2019-03-28T13:25:47.450

17

The original MMa fonts were designed by Andre Kuzniarek and Andrew Hunt.

From Andre:

Indeed, those are old easter eggs, and there used to be glyphs for each of us. They were "abandonded" in later releases. All were involved in dealing with font design, encoding and integration going back to the initial Unicode release (V3). Myself, Andy Hunt, Robby Villegas (rest his soul), and a cat named Spooky (mascot for Karen Fernsler).

Rest well, Robby, indeed.

edited Mar 28 '19 at 13:25

answered Mar 18 '19 at 00:57

flip

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\[Akuz]=Andre Kuzniarek? – Chris K Mar 18 '19 at 08:41
Oh well, I doubt there will be a better answer. Thanks! – Kevin Groenke Mar 26 '19 at 18:57
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@KevinGroenke- I sent an email to Andre to see if he'll confirm. I'll let you know. – flip Mar 27 '19 at 20:56
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@flip, you should edit your answer to include that. Nice history. :) – J. M.'s missing motivation Mar 28 '19 at 13:24
@J.M. - I forget one can edit things sometimes. Well, frequently :) – flip Mar 28 '19 at 13:27
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@flip I really appreciate your findings, please have my gratitude. – Kevin Groenke Mar 30 '19 at 16:35
@KevinGroenke - my pleasure. I think you can mark this as the 'preferred answer' or something like that, if you'd like. But I don't know who at which 'user level' is allowed to... I always like an excuse to get in touch with old friends and acquaintances, etc, so this was a perfect excuse. – flip Mar 30 '19 at 21:17

Who or what is named character Andy?

1 Answers1