I see. I had blinkers on for engineering which has symbols like nu for Poisson's ratio and epsilon for strain and I've developed some annoyance working with sou

I see. I had blinkers on for engineering which has symbols like nu for Poisson's ratio and epsilon for strain and I've developed some annoyance working with source code that's full of spelled out Greek letters where it's not even clear what they represent. Now I think about it, there are cases like you identified from finance where the Greek letter becomes the mainly known name, such as alpha and beta for Rayleigh damping coefficients. When implementing algorithms from literature, I've sometimes named variables with both - the description to aid understanding and the letter to make it clear how it corresponds to the original material. Still don't get to choose the letter though.