# Greek letters do not function inside tabular even with dollar sign

I am trying to use Greek letters inside a tabular-table, but it does not work. Underneath is the sourcecode and error report. Does anyone know how to fix this?

source code (relevant source only):

\begin{tabular}{| c | c | c | c |}
\hline
Klein & Groß & Sprechweise & \LaTeX{}-Schreibweise\\
\hline
\hline
$\alpha$ & $\Alpha$ & Alpha & \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{document}


Error report: ! Undefined control sequence [in line with the dollar signs]

• There is no \Alpha command defined – egreg Nov 6 '16 at 12:21
• Α (capital alpha) is A. Some goes for all Greek letters that are the same as Roman ones. Even ο (lower-case omicron) – Au101 Nov 6 '16 at 12:28
• By the way, if you're trying to use this to teach or display the whole Greek alphabet, it's a bad idea. I learnt this myself the hard way. Upper case Greek letters that LaTeX does provide, like \Sigma and \Pi, will be upright, while the lower case ones it provides will be italic – Au101 Nov 6 '16 at 12:30
• Except with a Frenchmath or upright option for some packages (fourier, kpfonts, txmath,… ). – Bernard Nov 6 '16 at 13:15
• I really don't like what's implied here. While the glyphs for A and Alpha are (mostly?) the same, the meaning is completely different, so, out-of-the-box, it's not semantic markup. There really ought to be a complete, self-consistent, set of commands for all the Greek letters, independent of whatever their glyphs may look like. – Brent.Longborough Nov 6 '16 at 14:27

As described in the comments to your question the capital version of the greek letter alpha is identical to capital a (A). Thus, there is no LaTeX command for this letter as it is already defined by A.

The set of greek letters that do not have a special command for their capital representation is Alpha (A), Beta (B), Epsilon (E), Zeta (Z), Eta (E), Iota (I), Kappa (K), Mu (M), Nu (N), Omicron (O), Rho (P), Tau (T), Upsilon (Y) and Chi (X).

To make your code compile simply replace \Alpha with A.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

\begin{document}
\begin{tabular}{| c | c | c | c |}
\hline
Klein & Groß & Sprechweise & \LaTeX{}-Schreibweise\\
\hline
\hline
$\alpha$ & $A$ & Alpha & \\
\hline
\end{tabular}
\end{document}