>
> Those examples would be a lot more compelling if there was an
> acceptable way to input those characters. Maybe we could support some
> kind of input method that enabled LaTeX style math notation as used by
> scientists for writing equations in papers?
Sympy already has a few of the basic TeX concepts. I imagine that something like Sympy notebooks (a browser-based interface) might one day gain support for this. A readline-ish method to do it would be a great extension to isympy (since it already works for output):
$ isympy
IPython console for SymPy 0.7.1.rc1 (Python 2.7.3-64-bit) (ground types: python)
In [1]: Symbol('beta')
Out[1]: β
In [2]: Symbol('c_1')
Out[2]: c₁
Oscar