Alpha Sigma Phi (), commonly known as Alpha Sig, is an intercollegiate men's social fraternity with 181 active chapters and provisional chapters. Founded at Yale in 1845, it is the 10th oldest Greek letter fraternity in the United States. The fraternity practices many traditions. Its Latin motto is Causa Latet Vis Est Notissima ("The cause is hidden, the results well-known"). The fraternity's official symbol is the phoenix, as the phoenix rises from the ashes of its old body, signifying the re-founding of the fraternity in the early 1900s. Due to active expansion efforts, Alpha Sigma Phi continues to offer services and opportunities to over 8,000 undergraduate students and well over 72,000 living members. History Founding Alpha Sigma Phi was founded by three men at Yale College in 1845 as a secret sophomore society composed of many of the school's poets, athletes, and scholars. Upon rising through the ranks of the school, members shared membership with Alpha Sigma Phi in their sophomore year, one of three fraternities in their junior year and Skull and Bones or Scroll and Key in their senior year. The founders of Alpha Sigma Phi were: Louis Manigault was born at Rue de la Paix #17, Paris, France, on November 21, 1828, while his mother and father were visiting their ancestors' homeland. He was a seventh generation descendant of Pierre Manigault, a French Huguenot who fled La Rochelle, France, because of religious persecution with the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685. These Manigaults immigrated to South Carolina, where they became very prosperous in the occupations of planting crops and the trading of planted goods, as well as merchandising. Stephen Ormsby Rhea was the son of John Rhea, an important cotton planter of Louisiana who helped open the disputed territory of West Florida and made it a part of the US and the state of Louisiana, through his involvement in the French and Indian war. Horace Spangler Weiser, of York, Pennsylvania, was a descendant of Conrad Weiser, also a refugee from Europe who became famous in the French and Indian War, representing several provisional chapters in treaty negotiations with Native Americans. Manigault and Rhea met at St. Paul's Preparatory School near Flushing, New York, where both were members of the same literary society and were preparing themselves for admission to Yale. Weiser attended a private school in New Haven, and he met Rhea early in his