Spelling

Two of the other Americans here, both of whom are studying humanities, were recently complaining about the differences between American and British spelling (color/colour and minimize/minimise, for example). Apparently some of their tutors accept American spelling, while others mark it as incorrect, and they're starting to confuse the two standards. One of them remarked to me, "You're lucky that at least math is the same everywhere."

The funny thing is that there are actually some differences in notation. A lecturer at an American university will usually draw a little arrow over a letter to show that it represents a vector; here the letter is underlined or has a ~ beneath it. Then the cross product is written with ʌ instead of ×, and when working in spherical coordinates, the roles of the angles θ and φ are reversed (but only by the physicists - the math department, confusingly, seems to use the same convention as the Americans). And, though I have yet to encounter this myself, one professor mentioned that "right-polarized" means the same thing to American engineers as "left-polarized" does to British engineers.

These are mostly minor differences, however, and the underlying ideas are exactly the same. It's almost as if they just spell things a little differently here.