Can be either, just depends on convention.
I think the agreed notation is that lowercase i is when the current is time-varient, i(t), but I've seen it be lowercase I when just talking about DC as well, and vice-versa, so it really just depends.
j is always lowercase though when talking about sqrt(-1).
From Mr. L's chopstick problem (where K = total number of people, including Mr. L's family, and N is number of chopsticks to chose from, and indices into chopsticks are zero-based):
next pair choice, leftmost chopstick, right bound, exclusive = (N-1) - 3(Ki-1)
It took me a couple of days to wrap my brain around that problem. This equation was the key to making the best choice for Ki remaining people.