KableExtra math symbols - r

Question

How can I insert 'equal or greater than' symbol in a kable?
On the small rmarkdown doc below I tried two different ways based on some
internet suggestions but neither work. I did try the argument 'escape=FALSE' but
it does not work either. Thanks for any pointers...
title: "Math symbols in column headers"
date: "January 15, 2020"
output: pdf_document
---
```{r}
library(kableExtra)
library(knitr)
a <- structure(list(MLE = c(0.0839, 0.2082, 0.4194, 0.8237, 1.6201
), MME = c(0.0839, 0.2082, 0.4194, 0.8234, 1.6147)), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA,
5L))
colnames(a) <- c("abundance of\n White Sharks\n $\\\\geq$ 40 inches","Percentage of \n White shark in
the population\n $\\\\geq{40}$ inches")
```
```{r}
kable(a, "latex", booktabs = T)
```
This is what I get...

Answer 1

You need to end up with \geq in the Markdown file. To get that, you enter "\\geq" in the R string, and specify escape = FALSE in the call to kable(). That is,
---
title: "Math symbols in column headers"
date: "January 15, 2020"
output: pdf_document
---
```{r}
library(kableExtra)
library(knitr)
a <- structure(list(MLE = c(0.0839, 0.2082, 0.4194, 0.8237, 1.6201
), MME = c(0.0839, 0.2082, 0.4194, 0.8234, 1.6147)), class = "data.frame", row.names = c(NA,
5L))
colnames(a) <- c("Abundance of\n White Sharks\n $\\geq 40$ inches","Percentage of \n White shark in
the population\n $\\geq 40$ inches")
```
```{r}
kable(a, "latex", booktabs = T, escape = FALSE)
```
This gives me
To respect the linebreaks, you need to use the linebreak function from kableExtra, i.e. something like this:
colnames(a) <- linebreak(c("Abundance of\n White Sharks\n $\\geq 40$ inches",
"Percentage of \n White shark in the population\n $\\geq 40$ inches"))
kable(a, "latex", booktabs = TRUE, escape = FALSE, align = "c")
which gives this output: