As a PhD student in maths, I can go on about this post for years probably. But I would like to give my perspective on the tiers, since I use the greek letters every day when doing math, and mathematicians put a good amount of thought into the choice of letter to use in an equation or proof.
I'm working in analysis so my point of view might be a bit skewed compared to the opinions of other people in maths.
Olympic: These letters are the ones everyone uses first unless there is a good reason not to. Mathematicians like to pair a variable or symbol with the word it represents so if we are talking about an identity map, some people may use ι instead of one of these.
Heroic: I love all of these, but in practice the only one I find a little tricky to distinguish and write myself is ω. I find χ and τ very pleasing to draw cus of their swishies and in general I think most people also like putting emphasis on a nice swish, so they are not hard to tell apart from the roman letters.
Exotic: The symbols ψ and φ get used quite a lot in analysis to denote functions. For the same reason of swishy satisfaction I like using them when writing and typesetting.
Mortal: Now we are entering controversial territory. I personally don't mind ι or κ. For the reasons of symbol-meaning pairing its not uncommon to see ι, but it's single swish at the bottom puts it in the danger zone when being written since you don't always manage to dot your i perfectly and some people naturally write an i with a swish like ι has. So when writing and typsetting I will only ever use ι if I cant use i or I for some reason.
κ is quite underrated imo. Its not that bad as ι because most people are consistent with the size of their lower case and capitals, and also k has a very distinctive long stem. Further, κ is also typeset and written by most people as just a more curvy and sexy k, with no stem. The stem of κ, as well as the two branches sticking out have a sexy curve to them which most people emphasize properly.
I feel bad to dog on a few greek letter cus they are really all our buddies, but I pretty much never see or use υ because it is easy to mess up with u, v (roman) and v (nu). I find both nu and upsilon hard to write cus you sort of have to bend your hand a bit awkwardly to get a curve on the strokes right to make them distinctive from roman u and v. It could be because I hold both pens and chalk like a troglodyte, but I have also noticed many fast black board writers slow down significantly to get these ones right.
Omnicron is literally just an upper and lower case o, O so no one ever tries to make a distinction with them or the roman letters.
Cursed: This is the only tier I take serious issue with because there are reasonable ways to pretty much guarantee that no one will get confused with these letters. η definitely doesn't belong here because it takes no extra effort to make the front leg of η a good bit longer than the back leg, and add a nice swish on the front leg for good measure. Like this
You can make the front leg smaller and your swish less pronounced if you are not as adventurous as I am.
ρ is also not hard to mess up because the convention in math handwriting is that the tail should have a little slant and many people dont close the circle
Nu (ν) is a little harder to defend because its wayy easier to mess up with u and v and is a little harder to write than most letters for me. However, it is used a lot in analysis along with μ when talking about measures so I am perhaps more used to seeing it and writing it than most people in math. This is how I stylize my nu to make it distinct
Damned: I agree 100% with this one. These are only acceptable to use when typesetting for me and I don't understand how some people manage to write them well. I can only ever remember one of them is called zeta and I am not bothered to remember what the other one is called.
Besides being wayy too squiggly, and I hope from my examples you will agree this is very different from swishy, mathematicians have to write curly braces { } a lot for sets, so most people's zetas end up looking like half arsed { beacuse of all the disproportionate practice we get for writing curly braces.
Thank you for attending my TEd talk on how cool almost all greek letters are!
yousharknotpass
gracieabrams
turnnoffyourmind
gummygunk
2087
