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I don't think that there is a single example of a greek letter which has been universally adopted by all of the different engineering and mathematics communitie

I don't think that there is a single example of a greek letter which has been universally adopted by all of the different engineering and mathematics communities to have a single non-overloaded meaning. The use of greek letters in academic writing has a single purpose: Compact notation. It has nothing to do with abstract readability.

astrange 5y ago
Greek letter abuse rarely happens in CS but there are a few cases. Try to guess what "lambda calculus" and "pi calculus" are without looking them up.
wtallis 5y ago
> The use of greek letters in academic writing has a single purpose: Compact notation. It has nothing to do with abstract readability. The compactness of the notation is a major factor in overall readability. Long variable names make it harder to see the overall structure of an expression. When operators, numerical constants and parentheses mostly are represented with one or two characters each but variable names are all much longer, then the only thing you can tell about a long line of code at first glance is what variables it uses as inputs. Mathematical pretty printing can help with some operators (eg. fractions) and make it more visually apparent what's being grouped together by parentheses, but even then long variable names will still detract from the ability recognize the structure of an expression.