And symbol (∧)

How to read it

OpenStax’s Contemporary Mathematics defines a conjunction as two statements joined by “and” or “but”, true only if every statement in it is true, and gives ∧ as its symbol. Oscar Levin’s Discrete Mathematics reads P ∧ Q as “P and Q” and says it is true when both P and Q are true; in every other case, one false or both false, it is false. Unicode names the character LOGICAL AND (U+2227) and gives it two other names, wedge and conjunction. The sign is a pointed arch, the opposite way up from ∨, the “or” symbol.

Also searched as: ∧, and symbol in logic, conjunction symbol, logical and, upside down v, wedge symbol.

Other ways of writing “and”

Not every book uses the wedge. forall x: Calgary, an open logic textbook from the University of Calgary, lists the ampersand & as a common choice (it began as a decorative form of the Latin et, “and”), a single dot •, and in some older texts no symbol at all, so that A and B is simply written AB. It calls ∧ the most common choice today. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on classical logic uses & throughout. Whichever sign a book uses, the meaning is the same.

Look-alikes

Unicode cross-refers ∧ to the up arrowhead ⌃ (U+2303), a separate character, and to the large n-ary logical and ⋀ (U+22C0), which joins a whole list of statements. The keyboard caret ^ looks similar but is a different character. In electronics, “and” is drawn as the AND gate.