I was writing on another list about the mathematician's use of the subjunctive, in phrases like "Let G be a group" or "Soit G un groupe". I wasn't sure whether "groupe" was masculine or feminine, so I googled "Soit G une group" and "Soit G un groupe", and got 214 and 252,000 hits, respectively, so that answered that. But I was amused that Google asked me "Did you mean 'Soit L un groupe'?" And sure enough, "Soit L un groupe" gets 5 million hits. Apparently the conventions of what variables are used to represent what sorts of entities varies from English to French. English speakers typically use G because it's the first letter of group, and if there's a second group to talk about we call it H, since that's the next letter of the alphabet. Any idea why the French use "L"? What letter to other languages use? And is there any mathematics written in Greek, and if so, do they have to avoid using pi or phi (and what other letters? gamma, often used for Euler's constant?) as variables? Or is it sufficiently clear from context? After all English mathematics routinely uses i as a variable in subscripts, and as the square root of -1, and that never seems to be a problem. -- Andy.Latto@pobox.com