Parentheses and brackets are very common in mathematical formulas. You can easily control the size and style of brackets in LaTeX; this article explains how.

[edit] Introduction

The size of the brackets can be manually set, or they can be resized dynamically in your document, as shown in the next example:

\[ 
\left \{
  \begin{tabular}{ccc}
  1 & 5 & 8 \\
  0 & 2 & 4 \\
  3 & 3 & -8 
  \end{tabular}
\right \}
\]

Notice that to insert the brackets, the \left and \right commands are used. Even if you are using only one bracket, both commands are mandatory.

[edit] Controlling types and sizes

The size of the brackets can be controlled explicitly

Manually sized brackets
 
\[
 \Bigg \langle 3x+7 \bigg \rangle
\]

The commands \Bigg and \bigg stablish the size of the delimiters < and > respectively. For a complete list of parentheses and sizes see the reference guide.

[edit] Reference guide

LaTeX markup	Renders as
\big( \Big( \bigg( \Bigg(
\big] \Big] \bigg] \Bigg]
\big\{ \Big\{ \bigg\{ \Bigg\{
\big \langle \Big \langle \bigg \langle \Bigg \langle
\big \rangle \Big \rangle \bigg \rangle \Bigg \rangle

[edit] Further reading

• Mathematical expressions
• Subscripts and superscripts
• Aligning equations with amsmath
• Display style in math mode
• Operators
• The not so short introduction to LaTeX2ε