All Greek and Latin

The other day I was talking to a Greek friend of mine when I realized, perhaps for the first time in my life, that there exist people in this world who actually use symbols like , etc. to communicate! I was so completely overwhelmed by this realization that I ended up spending the next half an hour imagining the various trials and tribulations that such a race must have to go through. It appeared to me, following almost as a corollary (!), that these people must be good at mathematics. That the sweet and elusive harmony of algebra which is buried somewhere deep within the machinations of the Greek alphabet must be transparent to them. By extension, obviously, these people must have a headstart in every other field which has chosen to express some subspace of this real world in this alphabet. This must evidently lead to unrealistic expectations from the young ones and it must invariably happen that every so often when a Greek is born whose genes may have mutated to not be automatically receptive to the Greek alphabet, thus leading to his subpar performance in mathematics, he must end up leading a socially isolated existence for the rest of his life. It would be a bit like being born an Indian and not being able to tolerate spice, or being born an optimistic Russian, or perhaps being born a centipede but with 99 legs. Even if we are ready to gloss over balance, such a centipede, I imagine, would try to fit in a society made up of centipedes but would be immediately frowned upon once the other centipedes count his legs. In much the same way, a Greek with subpar mathematics skills would find it difficult to justify his existence if he doesn't understand the function.

Then I started thinking about how the Greek alphabet is used by non-Greeks to express mathematics. It seemed to me that there exists an automatic and unsaid hierarchy of mathematical symbols in academia and one is expected to catch on to it without ever being explicitly told. People in academia tend to use Roman letters (a, b etc.) only to represent trivial things. Roman letters are likely to be used in a construction like, 'if a+b is 2 and a is 1 then what is b.' Such a construction is obviously primitive and no self respecting academician would ever accept to knowing the answer! The only people who still think seriously about such constructions are number theorists and that's only because they make the problem a tad more respectable by bringing in in the mix. Now I do this too. I do tend to use the lower case Roman alphabet for the most trivial of things - well mostly explanatory text. Then come the capitalized Roman letters which, on their day, may be used for vectors. But when it comes to higher order tensors it's got to be Greek alphabets. Lower case Greek alphabets for the garden variety order tensors but upper case ones for the most hardcore of equations which, as a corollary, must always be taken with a grain of salt.

Sometimes I wonder what the human society would have done without the invention of these symbols. This alphabet which is the mathematical equivalent of 'Here, now take me seriously,' has had a constant presence in most if not all serious scientific papers in the fields of maths, physics and engineering. I wonder how the Greeks actually deal with this problem. I asked this to my Greek friend and she thought for a bit and replied 'we use the Greek symbols for all the trivial stuff and the Roman numerals for some of the serious things.' 'Do they also walk on their heads?' I thought. I was completely stunned at this final revelation and was left reeling at the thought of reading one their papers. It would be a bit like the story of the boy who cried wolf. There was a boy who mischievously cried 'wolf' one too many times for others to believe him on the one time when he cried honestly. And there may very well be a Greek who mischievously said things were important one too many times for me to believe him on the one time when things actually may have been important.