What ancient symbol, whose name means "that which is associated with well-being", was a symbol of good fortune, before a bunch of asshats toyed with its orientation and turned it into a symbol of fear and repression?
Solar symbol swastika-like designs in Migration-period "Zierscheiben". The Kolovrat, or in Polish "Kołowrót", represents the Sun in Slavic neopaganism. It is familiar to almost every ancient Slavic culture. Solar symbol A solar symbol is a symbol representing the Sun. Common solar symbols include circles with or without rays, crosses or spirals. In religious iconography, personifications of the Sun or solar attributes are indicated by means of a halo or a radiate crown. When the systematic study of comparative mythology first became popular in the 19th century, scholarly opinion tended to over-interpret historical myths and iconography in terms of "solar symbolism". This was
Symbol of a differential operator Symbol of a differential operator In mathematics, the symbol of a linear differential operator is obtained from a differential operator of a polynomial by, roughly speaking, replacing each partial derivative by a new variable. The symbol of a differential operator has broad applications to Fourier analysis. In particular, in this connection it leads to the notion of a pseudo-differential operator. The highest-order terms of the symbol, known as the principal symbol, almost completely controls the qualitative behavior of solutions of a partial differential equation. Linear elliptic partial differential equations can be characterized as those whose principal symbol is nowhere zero.