Now why that statement about mathematicians?
The point is that Unicode has to deal with how text has been used by various communities in order to be the text encoding standard to rule them all.
[1] Unlike in prose where bold and such is just for emphasis. And at worst you can use informal markup (similar to MarkDown) and convey the same thing.
> Like the symbol for infinity is from the Hebrew alphabet.
Are you perhaps not confusing infinity with the symbol used to denote the cardinality of infinite sets? If the infinity symbol really comes from the Hebrew alphabet I'd love to hear more.