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.

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.

Controlling types and sizes

The size of the brackets can be controlled explicitly

\[ F = G \left( \frac{m_1 m_2}{r^2} \right) \]

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.

Reference guide

LaTeX markup	Renders as
\big( \Big( \bigg( \Bigg(	${\displaystyle {\big (}{\Big (}{\bigg (}{\Bigg (}{\big .}}$
\big] \Big] \bigg] \Bigg]	${\displaystyle {\big ]}{\Big ]}{\bigg ]}{\Bigg ]}}$
\big\{ \Big\{ \bigg\{ \Bigg\{	${\displaystyle {\big \{}{\Big \{}{\bigg \{}{\Bigg \{}}$
\big \langle \Big \langle \bigg \langle \Bigg \langle	${\displaystyle {\big \langle }{\Big \langle }{\bigg \langle }{\Bigg \langle }}$
\big \rangle \Big \rangle \bigg \rangle \Bigg \rangle	${\displaystyle {\big \rangle }{\Big \rangle }{\bigg \rangle }{\Bigg \rangle }}$

Further reading

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