You Gotta Know Greek

a b g d e f g h i t s

Many decisions have unintended consequences. I was a victim of one of these in my freshman year at Dartmouth. Some time earlier, it had been decided that fraternity life was best put off until sophomore year. Apparently no one communicated to the Mathematics Department that this would place an additional burden on them.

Dartmouth did not require that high school preparation for applicants in 1957 include a foreign language although immediate enrollment in a language as a freshman was required. My struggles with French to meet that requirement will be covered in another essay. I didn’t realize that there was a hidden language issue that nearly derailed my college career.

I was placed in an honors calculus course apparently because of a good score on the math SAT exam. One of the big changes from my high school advanced algebra and this course was that variables were no longer represented by the common alphabet. Letters like a, b, and c apparently weren’t enough for calculus. Instead they jumped right in with Greek letters and I didn’t know Greek and I didn’t recognize the level of organization that was required.

When my professor put a formula on the board he used the Greek term for the characters that he was using but I couldn’t relate his words to what I’d been reading. Since I didn’t know the Greek alphabet, I’d been naming the symbols using multi-word titles like what’s-it and thing-a-ma-jig but without writing them down in a table. There were three problems. First, I wasn’t consistent; line one’s what’s-it might become a thing-a-ma-jig in line two. Secondly, we kept getting more and more characters that needed naming and I wasn’t organized enough to creatively do the naming myself. Finally, I wasn’t able to translate the professor’s term to my terms.

I didn’t realize that the naming had already been done. One of the first pledge tasks when I pledged Sigma Alpha Epsilon at the beginning of sophomore year was to learn the Greek alphabet. Suddenly, thing-a-ma-bob became Psi and what-cha-ma-call-it became Sigma. All my struggles for two semesters could have been simplified. If only the first quiz in calculus had been on the Greek alphabet!

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