 <p>Thank you so much for asking this. It finally helped me solve my related problem.</p> <p>For me, \alpha and \beta both fail. They both fail even without the subscript part coming into play. But if I use the curly braces it works:</p> <pre><code>:math:`\alpha` </code></pre> <p>does not compile</p> <pre><code>:math:`{\alpha}` </code></pre> <p>gives me the symbol I want</p> <pre><code>:math:`{\\alpha}` </code></pre> <p>gives me the word 'alpha' written as adjacent math variables a, l, p, h, a.</p>