Strangest Notation? [closed]

While this may be a fruitless pursuit of anecdotes, I still ask: what is the strangest (or most blatantly wrong (at least in the eyes of common notation)) mathematical notation you have ever seen?


There is an old story about Lang and Mazur, Mazur tried to get Lang attention by using the worst notation possible. He wrote Xi conjugated over Xi, which looks like:

$$\frac{\overline{\Xi}}{\Xi}$$

P.S. You can read the story, narrated by Paul Vojta, in the AMS Notices issue dedicated to Lang: AMS Nottices Lang

It is on pages 546-547.


The single worst use of mathematical notation I have ever seen was in a set of lecture notes in which the author wanted to construct a sequence of equivalence relations, each one ($\equiv_n$) derived from the previous one ($\equiv_{n-1}$). After $i_0$ iterations of this procedure, the construction has no more work to do, and the sequence has converged to a certain equivalence relation $\equiv$ with desirable properties. The notes contained this formula: $$\equiv_{i_0+1}=\equiv_{i_0}=\equiv$$

I regret that I did not make a note of the source.