Your professor had great handwriting.

Why didn't he just write it as uppercase? Like three straight lines.

I like to think of lowercase xi as "vertical squiggle", which is of course different from "horizontal squiggle" also known as eta.

This was hilarious xD. You're really doing a great job of providing math jokes and fun math activities as of late. Keep it up!

This comic is the story of my life.

So true! haha lowercase Zeta is really hard too

Me n friends call it squigma.

It looks like a Chinese character written in cursive.

One of my math TA, on a course where xi was very commonly used (probably due to professors nastiness), taught me the trick: xi is just a "tau" with an "s" coming out of its @ss... works for me.

for me too the real trouble is to write a ξ different from a ζ.

At least this prof didn't like using xi a lot--like the one in comic #12. . . .

When my physics teacher used lowercase xi, I was wondering why nobody thought of using it as the 'spring constant' in Hooke's law. I mean, the letter looks exactly like a spring, right? Right?

My lecturer last term was doing a proof evolving a squiggle letter. About halfway through he wrote "therefore squiggle = squiggle over 2" or words to that effect. Which lead to frantic searching by us to find out where he'd switched between the different squiggles.

There is a special place in hell reserved for the examiners who include both zeta and xi in the same question.

I found out that if you don't think about it, and just flick your wrist a lot, it tends to work out quite well. I started replacing boring variables with xi in theorems, cuz it's so satisfying to write it successfully.

It annoys me that no one takes the time to write a decent curly bracket, though.

Folks, don't be lazy, when you encounter a new symbol, do the same thing you did when you were first learning to write - fill a page with it. It takes 10-15min, and you will produce symbols that everyone will envy :D:D that's the case at my college, anyway :D

It's funny cause I am greek and xi is standard for me...
(tip1: it's just an epsilon with hat and tail
tip2: If epsilon is hard too, it's a 3 with a line going down(sort of))