Adding Math/Greek Symbols in LaTeX Text Mode
One of the strengths of LaTeX is that it handles special symbols quite well and is well suited for mathematical annotation in general. However, sometimes you need to add special symbols to the main body of your document and it doesn’t make sense to do it in math mode. Two examples of this are when you want to include a less-than sign or a greek symbol in your text. Firstly, you need to know the macro for the symbol you want. In the case of the less-than sign, it is simply <. The macro for the alpha character is \alpha. To insert one of these symbols in text mode, simply surround it with $ signs. For example:
The t-test results were highly significant (p$<$0.0001), indicating that the ER$\alpha$ gene was responsible for tumor growth.