MMM (Mystery Math Message)

One day a mysterious message showed up written very small in the lower corner of the chalk boared someone wrote. √-1 2^3 Σ π, and I liked it. No one knew what it meant. It looked like a whacked out math problem that someone made up. The teacher urged us to investigate and discover its meaning. They only clue we had was that it would translate in to a sentence. The way I saw it, it had four parts. If each symbol could be solved the answer could be found. On a scrap piece of paper I rewrote the message.

The last symbol seemed familiar from geometry. There was the area formula for circles, π r^2 but what was that symbol called... Pi!!! That’s it the forth part of the message is pi.

The second part looks easy as well 2^3 ok a number to a power is how many times the number are multiplied by itself. So 2x2=4 and 4x2=8 the second part of the equation is 8. __ 8 __ Pi, and I liked it... it still doesn't make sense.

So far the symbols have been about math so that sideways M must be a math symbol for something...