# What will mathematicians do when they run out of letters in the Greek and English alphabets? [closed]

Like $$x$$, $$y$$, $$z$$ are commonly understood to be dimensions and $$\theta$$ is an angle, $$\pi$$ is a specific irrational constant, and $$\tau$$ is two times $$\pi$$, et cetera.

They must be running out of letters by now. Is that a problem? What's the solution?

• Hebrew, Cyrillic, reusing letters as needed, ..... – user296602 Mar 14 '16 at 0:54
• Letters like $\pi$ are used for other things also, with the meaning clear from context. – littleO Mar 14 '16 at 0:55
• computer scientists already solved this, just concatenate letters to make words, then the possibilities are endless – frogeyedpeas Mar 14 '16 at 0:58
• what about subscripts? You can always use $\alpha_1$,$\beta_3$, etc – Aditya Dev Mar 14 '16 at 1:08
• ^ and that is why some differential geometry formulas start looking like centipedes crawling across the page – Justin Benfield Mar 14 '16 at 1:09

• Some things get unfrozen though. I've often seen people use $1_A$ to mean the identity morphism on A. – Q the Platypus Mar 14 '16 at 1:03
• @QthePlatypus I thought something similar, in particular because J. H. Conway does use the notation $6$ for a group! But one difference may be that $6$ is always the name of a particular group (in this case, the cyclic one with $6$ elements), so you still won't see "Let $6$ be a group". In your example, you would never write "Let $1_A$ be a morphism," because it always means that one particular morphism! – pjs36 Mar 14 '16 at 1:22