[Tex/LaTex] “contradiction” symbol in some font, somewhere

symbols

Before anyone slates me for this, I have checked detexify and texdoc symbols. Indeed, the latter led me to the following phrase (3rd paragraph of Section 3):

Although there have been many requests on comp.text.tex for a contradiction symbol, the ensuing discussion invariably reveals innummerable ways to represent contradiction in a proof … Because of the lack of notational consensus, it is probably better to spell out "Contradiction!" than to use a symbol for this purpose.

Normally, I'd agree with this sage advice. Two things prevent me from doing so:

  1. In a presentation, brevity is the soul of comprehension.

    That is to say, it is better still to have a funny symbol and to say "Thus we have a contradiction" than to have the long word "Contradiction!" and still say "Thus we have a contradiction".

  2. The ellipsis in the above quote lists various symbols that the discussion on comp.text.tex presumably discussed. None of them is correct. The correct contradiction symbol is (something like):

    \ \/ /
 \/\/
 /\/\    
/ /\ \

    That is, four diagonal lines, two in each direction. It should also be a bit larger than a "regular" symbol, perhaps more like a \prod or \sum.

So, my question: is there a font with this symbol?

Best Answer

The Unicode symbol "⨳" (U+2A33, it is called "SMASH PRODUCT" for some mysterious reasons) you are looking for is available with modern TeX engines (XeTeX, LuaTeX): You'll have to load the unicode-math package and an appropiate OpenType math font such as XITS Math, then you can access it as \smashtimes.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{unicode-math}
\setmathfont{XITS Math}
\begin{document}
    $\smashtimes$
\end{document}
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