What is this piece of punctuation?

It's called Tilde.

The tilde ( /ˈtɪldə/; ˜ or ~ ) is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character comes from Spanish and Portuguese, from the Latin titulus meaning "title" or "superscription", though the term "tilde" has evolved and now has a different meaning in linguistics.

Commonly in mathematics and other everyday use the tilde can be understood to mean "approximately"; or to imply an estimation. For example, one would type "I had ~30 points." This would mean "I had about 30 points."

Cute elephant, BTW :o)

Question 1: What is it called?

Answer: It is called a 'Tilde". A "tilde" is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character comes from Spanish and Portuguese, from the Latin titulus meaning "title" or "superscription", though the term "tilde" has evolved and now has a different meaning in linguistics.

Quesiton 2: What does it represent?

Answer: Read the answer to "Question 3", they tie into each other.

Question 3: What is it's function?

Answer: Commonly in mathematics and other everyday use the tilde can be understood to mean "approximately"; or to imply an estimation. For example, one would type "I had ~30 points." This would mean "I had about 30 points."

In some languages, the tilde is used as a diacritical mark ( ˜ ) placed over a letter to indicate a change in pronunciation, such as nasalization.

It was originally written over a letter as a mark of abbreviation, but has since acquired a number of other uses as a diacritic mark or a character in its own right. These are encoded in Unicode at U+0303 ̃ ​ combining tilde and U+007E ~​ tilde (as a spacing character). And there are more similar characters for different roles. Especially in lexicography the tilde as a separate character or swung dash (⁓) is used in dictionaries to indicate the omission of the entry word.

A tilde (pronounced TILL-duh or TILL-day) looks like this: ~. It's a special typographic character found on most keyboards that means various things, depending on the context. In some operating systems, including UNIX, the tilde is used to represent the current user's home directory. On Web server systems, the tilde is frequently used by convention as the first character for any user's home directory in the file system. Since users often keep personal or business Web pages on a server under their personal home directory, you will often see the tilde as part of Web addresses. As a mathematical symbol, the tilde means "approximately" and in logic it means "not."

The tilde is one of the 128 alphanumeric and special characters in ASCII, the most common standard for electronic text exchange. The tilde happens to be ASCII character 126. It's sometimes called a "twiddle" or a "squiggle."

The tilde ( /ˈtɪldə/; ˜ or ~ ) is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character comes from Spanish and Portuguese, from the Latin titulus meaning "title" or "superscription", though the term "tilde" has evolved and now has a different meaning in linguistics.

It was originally written over a letter as a mark of abbreviation, but has since acquired a number of other uses as a diacritic mark or a character in its own right. These are encoded in Unicode at U+0303 ̃ ​ combining tilde and U+007E ~​ tilde (as a spacing character).

It is a tilde.

Means approximately in mathematics

As well as its mathematical function it can also be a guide to pronunciation.

I use it when I am asking a poll question - just because it looks nice lol

How are you EC? :0)

Tilde

Now you know that, you can find out the rest quite easily, and much better than I could tell you.

i use it to mean around/approximately if i'm being lazy

It's called a Tilde. ~~~~~~~~~~

its requires no apostrophe