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Re: Binary Relations, draft 1

At 07:36 -0500 1998/11/17, Y&Y, Inc. wrote:
>It seems though that upright lower case Greek is not used much in math.

As it is not available in the standard fonts provided by TeX and AMS-TeX,
which is what the pure mathematicians normally use, it is hard to use it.
But I think if it is avaialable, they might use it.

>It is used by Physicists when talking about things like alpha particles and
>pi mesons.  So an upright Greek *text* font is needed (as in MathTime Plus).

So this sounds in line with the empirical rule I gave, as these particles
are "constants".

At 13:44 +0100 1998/11/17, Thierry Bouche wrote:
>Indeed, it is an injury caused by TeX that this usage has been lost.
>BTW, these are more or less codified by an ISO standard about math
>notations (published in France by AFNOR, the upright for constants is
>explicit in the AFNOR version, i'm not sure about the ISO) -- whose
>reference i can't find right now.

I think this standard was discussed in the LaTeX3 project mailing list too.
There is however an ISO standard for physicists using tensors going against
this empirical rule.

But the main point is that the upright math Greek symbols seem to be needed
in order to express certain semantic features.

  Hans Aberg
                  * Email: Hans Aberg <mailto:haberg@member.ams.org>
                  * Home Page: <http://www.matematik.su.se/~haberg/>
                  * AMS member listing: <http://www.ams.org/cml/>