# What do Greek Mathematicians use when they use our equivalent Greek letters in formulas and equations?

Like for example, it's common to use the Greek letter $\theta$ to represent an angle right? So what would a Greek person doing math use to represent an angle? Would they also use $\theta$? Or is there another notation that they would use in order for them to use their letters like we do? Such as if we say $A\geq B$, would a Greek student, mathematician, or whoever say: $\alpha \geq \beta$ or is there something else they say? It just seems like the Greek letters from a non-Greek point of view have so much meaning to us, but then how do they percieve their letters used in mathematics?

• What do we use to denote slope of a straight line? Well, either the letter $\,a\,$ or $\,m\,$...I guess greek students use more or less the same letters as we do, but perhaps there's someone from Greece around to disipate any doubt. Oct 18 '12 at 5:04
• Nice question - I've wondered about that myself. Oct 18 '12 at 5:13
• I just know about Russian books: They write the formulas in latin style and the rest in cyrillic. So my guess is that mathematical formula are more or less universal (as are numbers). Oct 18 '12 at 7:35
• @Fabian i like your answer, I looked up on google Cyrillic and I found where the notation commonly used for partial derivatives comes from. Oct 18 '12 at 15:21
• By the way, A and B are Greek letters too.
Mar 9 '18 at 11:14

The Greeks seems to use the Latin letters together with Greek letters as the rest of us. Here is a screen dump from some notes on Functional analysis. Of course this is just an example.

• Very interesting, thank you for that. I never thought about the fact that latin letters are pretty much the same as English letters. I will accept this as an answer that makes sense to me, but I will leave it up to anyone to believe what they believe is right Oct 18 '12 at 17:47

I am Greek.
We use all the letters, Greek or Latin. But we pronounce some of them in a different way.
For example the letter $$\mu$$ is pronounced "me". The letter $$\beta$$ as "vita". The angles are almost always named as $$\theta, \phi, \omega$$.
If somebody writes $$A\ge B$$ we read the same as $$\alpha\ge \beta$$.
The only problem is when you want a student to understand that $$\chi \psi$$ denotes $$\chi\cdot \psi$$ but $$\ln a$$ has nothing to do with $$l\cdot n \cdot a$$.
Finally, I wanted to add that actually $$\pi$$ is not pronounced like the food - for example (apple-pie) - but like "me" with the letter p at the beginning (that is, "pe").

• That might cause some giggles in elementary schools here on $\pi$-Day (March 14) ;-)
– robjohn
Oct 28 '20 at 16:49

In my experience with Greeks, they set $a = \alpha$ and $b=\beta$ etc... however, the Greeks I knew were beyond associating a concept with a letter, so perhaps these are not the Greeks which you seek.

I do recall many conversations of the form: "is it "a" or is it "$\alpha$"" to which I would inevitably get the annoyed retort: "yes".

They also use the same (Greek) letters. For example, for angles, it is very common to use $$\phi$$ or $$\theta$$ and in equations, they use $$\chi$$ and $$\psi$$. Similarly, they use the Greek alphabet (capital letters) Α, Β, $$\Gamma$$, $$\Delta$$, etc., for points in Geometry, etc cetera.