The Greek Greek alphabet
One of my professors is from Greece. Unfortunately, it seems that over the thousands of years since the Greek alphabet was invented, the version of the Greek glyphs used by Greek-speaking Greeks has diverged quite a bit from the version inherited by LaTeX-speaking mathematicians. Thus, when a Greek-speaker writes on the board about a mathematical topic heavily laden with Greek letters — e.g. cyclotomic fields and their rings of integers — but the audience has been brought up on LaTeX and Knuth’s Computer Modern fonts, and the lecturer’s handwriting is messy enough to begin with, the inevitable result is widespread confusion.
To help others in a similar boat, I have prepared a table of some of the more confusing Greek Greek symbols I encountered today.
| If you see this: | You might think it is: | But in Greek Greek it’s actually |
|---|---|---|
 |
b | β |
 |
J or ב | ζ |
 |
WTF??? | ξ |
For more samples of Greek Greek handwriting, look here and here.