TeX is written by a mathematician, and has always contained good support for formatting mathematical text. AUC TeX supports this tradition, by offering a special minor mode for entering text with many mathematic symbols. You can enter this mode by typing C-c ~.
Command: LaTeX-math-mode
(C-c ~) Toggle LaTeX-math-mode. This is a minor mode rebinding
the key LaTeX-math-abbrev-prefix to allow easy typing of
mathematical symbols. ` will read a character from the keyboard,
and insert the symbol as specified in LaTeX-mathlist. If given a
prefix argument, the symbol will be surrounded by dollar signs.
You can use another prefix key (instead of `) by setting the variable LaTeX-math-abbrev-prefix.
User Option: LaTeX-math-abbrev-prefix
A string containing the prefix of LaTeX-math-mode commands;
This value defaults to `.
The variable LaTeX-mathlist holds the actual mapping.
User Option: LaTeX-mathlist
Alist containing key-command mappings to use in LaTeX-math-mode.
The car of each element is the key and the cdr is the macro name.