Kappa

Kappa (uppercase Κ, lowercase κ or cursive ϰ; Greek: κάππα, káppa) is the 10th letter of the Greek alphabet, used to represent the sound in Ancient and Modern Greek. In the system of Greek numerals, Kʹ 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. Kappa (uppercase Κ, lowercase κ or cursive ϰ; Greek: κάππα, káppa) is the 10th letter of the Greek alphabet, used to represent the sound in Ancient and Modern Greek. In the system of Greek numerals, Kʹ 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.