# Learning math-oriented French

I'd like to read several papers which I find interesting, but they are all in French. I have no problem with taking a traditional French class or learning it via some other method. However, I realize that I will probably not be introduced to a lot of mathematically-oriented vocabulary. Does anyone know of a good reference for this material?

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The mathematical words are usually the easy bit. Kai Wen Lan has a glossary that might help. –  Dylan Moreland Dec 5 '11 at 17:55
The first year of college French is, I think, the way to go. Next, maybe, get a French text on a mathematical subject you already know, and go through it. –  GEdgar Dec 5 '11 at 18:54
I think that's what I'll end up doing GEdgar, thanks! Also thank you Dylan, that sort of glossary was almost exactly what I was looking for. –  Forest Belton Dec 6 '11 at 18:15
For some reason the French like to denote an open interval by $]a,b[$ instead of $(a,b)$ and they put a lot of space between an equation and any grammatical punctuation. Probability distributions are still called "lois" in French, which comes across as somewhat quaint and old-fashioned in English. Read some of the papers at numdam.org just to get a feel for the language. –  JL344 Jul 6 '12 at 1:49

The mathematical vocabulary in French is not usually much of a problem: the words tend to be either slight spelling variations of the English words (vecteur, mesurable, isomorphe...) or translations of the corresponding non-mathematical terms (ensemble = set, suite = sequence, carré = square...). There are a few tricky things to watch out for, e.g. under the influence of Bourbaki, in France $0$ is considered to be positive.