What sort of character is this ()

Question

I recently came across this answer on Sci-Fi Stack Exchange. It appears to be written in a font designed to look like hard-to-read, old fashioned handwriting. As such, to make it easier to read, I copy/pasted it into gedit (a text editor that does not support formatting — like Notepad). To my surprise, the strange formatting stayed. Upon further inspection (i.e., Googling the most strange looking characters, noticing the year appears to be written partially normally) I came to the conclusion that they are a set of strange letter-like characters in Unicode.

My question has two parts:

1. Am I correct about what these characters are?
2. If so, why does Unicode contain extra characters that appear to serve no purpose other than that of fonts?

Answer 1

It is the Unicode character U+1D4E6 – Mathematical Bold Script Capital W.

The letter is from the Unicode block ‘Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols’. It is used by mathematicians to distinguish different objects, e.g., different sets. In Word, the character is accessible by Insert Equation → Symbols → Scripts.

As the character set looks kind of ancient, you can of course write regular text in it as well, e.g., a Sci-Fi story.