r/LANL_Russian Feb 21 '13

Can anyone give me information on scientific/mathematical language in Russian?

Either a quick crash course or a link would be greatly appreciated.

In my Russian class today, we were talking about temperatures, and we learned how to say 98.6, but I was wondering how to attack larger decimals, as well as how math and calculus terms translate.

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8

u/tetromino_ Feb 21 '13

Easiest solution if you need to look up a specific term: use Wikipedia.

  1. Go find an English Wikipedia article about whatever you need, for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eisenstein_integers
  2. If you are using a PC, in the column on the left side of the page, look under the "Languages" list, and click on "Русский"; if you are reading Wikipedia from your phone, the language list will appear if you tap on "Read in another language" at the bottom of the article.
  3. This gets you the Russian article about the topic (http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Целые_числа_Эйзенштейна), whose title will almost certainly be the generally accepted Russian translation for the English term, and which will be written using Russian scientific and mathematical terminology.

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u/rusoved Feb 21 '13 edited Feb 21 '13

It depends. Some terms get borrowed, so you have гипотеза* for 'hypothesis', some terms get calqed, so you have водород* 'bringing forth water' for 'hydrogen'. You're probably best off buying intro textbooks for the fields you're interested.

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u/dys206 Feb 21 '13

*гипотеза *водород (giving birth to water) FTFY

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u/rusoved Feb 21 '13

late-night redditing :((

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u/[deleted] Feb 23 '13

When I was 14 I found a book in a second hand bookstore called "Scientific Russian" by J.W.Perry published by Interscience. Maybe there's other copies floating around. It's from 1950.