French Mathematics Vocabulary Flashcards
I’m currently studying for the language exam for my master’s degree, which will involve translating a page of mathematics from French into English. I speak conversational French, but that still leaves me with the need to learn mathematical vocabulary. For this we have the ultimate memory tool. That’s right. I made a set of flashcards to learn mathematical French.
The content from these flashcards comes from Joël Bellaïche’s slides “French for Mathematicians: A linguistic approach”, which I’ve linked here via Perma.cc to prevent possible link rot. The original page is hosted at Bellaïche’s Brandeis site. I’d highly recommend this as a resource if you want to brush up on your French grammar as well.
Since I want to translate from French to English, and I’m not worried about going the other way, I’ve left out those of Bellaïche’s translations which I can guess just by sounding out the words. For example, a “forme différentielle” is a differential form. Each of the 43 flashcards in this deck contains a word or phrase which, in my extremely biased opinion, does not anglicize as easily as that.
The deck is available in two file formats:
- For Anki users: French-math.apkg. (If you don’t already have Anki, I highly recommend it.)
- For those who prefer tab-separated text files: French-math.txt.
If you can think of any vocabulary that you’d like to see in these decks, contact me at the email on the main page. Good luck.