I earned it as the larger part being on the side of the bigger number
.<:
Another way to remember is that < is like a squished L, for “Less than”
This is how I always remember it
Open end is big space (bigger number). Closed end is smaller space (smaller number).
I honestly don’t understand how people struggle with this, but maybe it’s some kind of light dyslexia. I don’t judge people with dyslexia, obviously. It’s easy for me, as someone who doesn’t have dyslexia, to claim it is easy to see.
I don’t know about everyone else but before I figured out the visual clues of the symbols on my own, the only explanation I ever got was “> is greater than, < is less than” but I was a kid and there was nothing stopping me from interpreting “10 < 100” as “100 is less than 10” which confused the hell out of me.
Big side big number, little side little number
It can also be read as a statement, which can be true or false. You can fully well write “3 > 5”, but the statement is false. 👍
The teacher who first taught me told me “Pac Man wants to get the most points” and that stuck with me
Thanks I finally understood this thread, kept thinking people were viewing the crocodile/duck/whatever from above
“How do you know if someone is doing a phd in physics?”
Ehh
- They tend to get the sign wrong, or straight up not know it and end every sentence with “or the other way around”
- their room is a mess
- they have a soldering iron and a box full of Arduinos/Rasberry Pis/ESPs
- they have weird hobbies, (or none, because their work is sufficiently shaped like weird hobbies/obsessions)
- they regularly say “local minimum” and “higher order effects” in casual conversation
What did I forget?
According the old joke, and with no offence to scholars, the answer is :
“They’ll fucking tell you”
MesseR Rechts, GabeL Links.
Every single time when setting up dishes on the table.
when you hold your hands with your fingers spread out in front of you the L is on the left
*palms away from you
What the bird beak pecks is meek.
I see nothing wrong with this.
i feel like i’ve been using latex for so long that at this point my brain has been rewired to see ≤ as ‘\le’ (less than or equal to) and ≥ as ‘\ge’ (greater than or equal to), and then this dictates how i view < and > as well
I worked for years in a data validation system. All day I was writing rules using the symbols and writing the decode of the rule in words - less than or equal to
I really don’t need mnemonics
And then here’s me having to have my wife help my daughter with her middle school math assignments because they entirely mystify me.
It’s a thing that I’ve always thought that people over-complicate. It’s just there, the small side with the small number the big side with the big number…
For a while, I’ve seen “<” and “>” as a slanted “=”, which is to say, these numbers are not equal, and the larger side is the larger number and the smaller side is the smaller number.
Works for me, IDK.
But shouldn’t it be 8 < 1 because the eight is heavier and squeezes the bars of the = together?
But shouldn’t it be 8 < 1
That would be a pair of scissors, on its way to cut the number 1.
I’m with you, the croc is an opportunist and will eat the smaller, easier prey.
its not a scale exactly but the size of the ends shows the size of the numbers.
No, since it’s bigger it stretches the lines apart :)
Thinking of an alligator is more fun though.
“It’s always pointing to the smaller number” is what my elementary teacher said 2<3
Somehow, people don’t teach this interpretation at schools. (Despite it being so obvious that it was clearly the original reasoning behind the symbols.) And then nobody talks about the fact that nobody knows how to read them, forever.
Mine had something about crossing a line through the symbol and seeing if it makes a 4 or a 7. Honestly, “the crocodile wants to eat the big number” is still better than this.
This is only tangentially related but I’ve noticed an increase in people saying backslash instead of slash when speaking an internet address aloud. I think many more people struggle with / vs \ than > vs <.
Just to note, backslash or forward slash refers to the side the slash falls to.
I remember it because I’m old and was into computers before the internet. Local drive was backslash "" as a directory separator and online it was slash “/”.
Are you a programmer? I’ve never struggled with them either, but I’ve had a lot of exposure to them due to programming since I was like 11
I am a software dev, I’ve been exposed to these since I was 5 and I’ve always thought they should be reversed, I know the logic is “bigger gap, bigger number” and never make a mistake, but deep down I know it would be more logical to “point the arrow toward the bigger number”, it just makes sense to me.
Whoever my first teacher who taught me this did over complicate it, because when I wrapped my brain around bigger side equals bigger number and smaller side equals smaller (much later than I should have) it was a revelation and also seemed ridiculous it didn’t start out that simple.
I agree. It’s totally simple and people overcomplicate.
BTW one nice thing about German is, that you can even use the same logic for Boolean operators: The AND operator ∧ is called UND being the shorter word (when you put the name at the top). The OR operator ∨ is called ODER being the longer word.
You can use the same logic in English if you Place AND/OR at the bottom instead 😁
i also think the “etymology” of the boolean symbols is very helpful in remembering which is which. in lattice theory, their use was inspired by similar notation in set theory. so,
A ∨ Bis likeA ∪ B, whileA ∧ Bis likeA ∩ B.generally,
A ∨ Bis “the smallest thing that’s greater than or equal to both A and B”, whileA ∧ Bis “the biggest thing that’s less than or equal to both A and B”. similarly to howA ∪ Bis “the smallest set that contains both A and B”, whileA ∩ Bis “the largest set that’s contained in both A and B”. you can also take things a step further by saying that in the context of sets,A ≤ BmeansA ⊆ B. doing this means thatA ∨ B = A ∪ B, whileA ∧ B = A ∩ B. and from this perspective, the “sharp-edged” symbols (<,∧,∨) are just a generalization of their “curvy” counterparts (⊂,∩,∪).in the context of boolean algebra, you can set
False < True, which at first may seem a bit arbitrary, but it agrees with the convention the thatFalse = 0andTrue = 1, and it also makesA ∨ BandA ∧ Bhave the same meanings as described above.Math is my worst subject by far. This was incomprehensible to me at first, but I read it a few times and I started to kind of get it, so thank you for that.
In my mind, boolean operators meant things like AND/OR in internet searches. This functionality and using quotation marks to mean “these exact words” seem to no longer work on Google anyway.
Does anyone know how to make these work the way they used to? I used to be quite the “google-fu” master, but search has gone to total shit.
for some reason to remember ∩ and ∪ when I first learned it in school I visualized a mirrored symbol on top. the ∩ looked like a X which represented an intersection, while ∪ looked like an O which represented a whole. for English ∪ already looks like a U which can be thought of as short for union. that would’ve been easier.
ooh the mirror trick is quite handy. i don’t think i’ve heard that one before. i’ll keep that one in my back pocket in case i ever need it some day. i can’t remember exactly how i learned what they meant, but i think it was probably u for union and n for ntersection.
for English the AND sign looks like an A anyway. if you remember that for AND the OR is just the opposite.
I always remember those as “knife” and “cup”, but you have to know that I use my cups the wrong way around.
When you have two things AB on a table and you come in with a knife or cup (NB: upside down) from above, the knife will separate them “A or B” while the cup will catch them together like a pair of angry wasps “A and B”.
“The entirety of the small number constitutes a relatively smaller portion of the big number. Thus, the open side of > points to the smaller number to indicate that it’s a magnified view within the larger number.”
I hope this helps overcomplicate things for you. We must all return to crocodile.
Nope, it just sounds odd.
I’ll stick with big side = big number, small side = small number.
Crocodile? Are you guys from Florida? In Europe we learned it as duck beak, it just makes much more sense, where are the teeth? Nowhere it’s not an alligator mouth it’s a beak
I’m from Europe and I learned it as a wale (and I’m from southern Europe)
In the pre-digital age when most of this was pencil markings, it was not uncommon to see someone had drawn the teeth in.
A greedy crow is what they told me
Nono, we don’t do math in Florida anymore. Also we’d be more likely to use “alligator” (tho we have plenty of both)
Nah fam, if your bird looks like that it’s probably dead. I also learnt it as the crocodile in Germany
Duck, crocodile, they’re both archosaurs. Which means if it’s either, they should have a premaxillar fenestra on the lower jaw, but I’m not seeing any. Clearly, this must be a possum.
I’m thinking horribly mangled German bank executive with a lisp 🤷
I learned it as Pac Man.
I don’t think I’ve ever been taught a mnemonic with animals
The small number is on the small side of the symbol, the large number is on the large side, it seems pretty intuitive to me, to be honest.
I learned it that way, along with the = sign showing the sides are equal. But by the time I was teaching, we used Pac-Man, drawing the rest of him around the hungry mouth. I still added “another way to look at it is,” and described the spaces:
Big>little same=same little<Big
Because it doesn’t matter how your mind makes the connection, as long as it works for you.
Edit to add:Pac-people are easier to draw than crocodiles
The Nemo file manager still managed to fuck it up. ‘Triangle pointing down means small filesizes on top, yeah?’
It is weird that Z is considered a bigger letter than A. If triangle pointing down means descending order, it would be Z-A. Ergo, it must mean ascending order and small filesizes are on top just like small letters are on top.
