Math French Words

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.

I have given a 3-hour course trying to help mathematical students with an English background to read papers in French. You can find notes here.

Please notice a few differences between French and English. "Un nombre positif" is a non negative number, "supérieur à" is "greater than or equal to". In English 0 is not a natural number, while in French it is "un entier naturel". A stack is "un champ", while a field is "un corps (commutatif in rather old texts, now what we used to call 'un corps non commutatif' has become 'une algèbre à division'). Finite fields were first known as "champs de Galois". A linear or vector space is always "un espace vectoriel". A covering is "un revêtement", a map "une application", and both manifolds and varieties are "variétés". A set is "un ensemble". An abstract is "un résumé", but abstract structures are "structures abstraites". And both groups and music bands are "groupes"!