Welcome to MathOverflow

Question

4

1

Hi,

I am trying to read some papers on Algebraic Geometry in French. But I am stuck in understanding some Math.French.Words. Anybody has a good reference for it?

Thank you all.

flag	asked Dec 30 at 12:59 Sina 239●7

1

I don't know of any such references. I wonder if this site could not be a very good place to collectively produce a lexicon with a list of french words and their english translations (and comments that are helpful, for example to signal slightly different uses, or tricks to remember the translations). Their should be just one answer, of course in community wiki, and each user would edit it to add words at their right place for the alphabetic order. – Joël Dec 30 at 13:16

3

For a start see for example here math.unicaen.fr/~reyssat/dico/dicofa.html . A general method I find helpful is via wikipedia; for somewhat standard things it works quite well: go to the page of the object or related one and then change the language. – quid Dec 30 at 13:38

7

@Joël: This site is not a good place for creating and in particular maintaining something like this. – quid Dec 30 at 13:42

2

As said by Joel, your linguistic background is important. If your background is english or german, I would say that a standard french dictionary from a bookstore is sufficient, because the mathematical vocabulary is really very similar and for the words that are not so similar one can usually puzzle it out from a standard dictionary. Reading Bourbaki in this manner is an excellent way to learn mathematical French. That's how I learned it, anyway, although I must admit that it was not good enough for passing my French language exam at Princeton on the first try...... – Lee Mosher Dec 30 at 16:12

1

A useful book in that regard is the bilingual edition of the Grothendieck-Serre correspondence (from 1956-1964): lots of typical french sentences, and technical math words, translated carefully side by side. A few more recent technical words are thus missing, to be found online. The book is edited by the AMS, and a preview is here books.google.fr/… – Thomas Sauvaget Dec 30 at 20:18

show 2 more comments

Ricky · Accepted Answer · 2012-12-30 16:05:51Z UTC

16

Kai-Wen Lan has written a glossary for French and German. Quoting from his web page "These are prepared primarily for reading mathematical texts". You can find the French one here.

answered Dec 30 at 16:05

Ricky
1,702●1●9●20

Thanks Ricky. Your answer was very helpful. Also, thanks others for their help. – Sina Jan 3 at 22:42

Math French Words

Remember to vote up questions/answers you find interesting or helpful (requires 15 reputation points)

1 Answer

You can accept an answer to one of your own questions by clicking the check mark next to it. This awards 15 reputation points to the person who answered and 2 reputation points to you.