Okay, I fully concede upfront that this is a really, really dumb question. But, in my defence, I’m pretty dumb. Blame television.
Anyway, I’m always getting confused about what ‘<’ and ‘>’ mean in maths. I know one means ‘bigger than’ and the other means ‘smaller than’ but I keep getting them mixed up. Since I’m sick of googling each time I see them, I was wondering if there was a handy little trick to remembering which one was which.
Cheers.
The wide end always points towards the greater value, the narrow end towards the lesser value.
My maths teacher always told us it was a greedy mouth - trying to eat the bigger thing each time.
^Yup. I was taught that the ‘alligator’ eats the bigger number.
I never thought about it, but if I was explaining it to a kid, I’d say “Less than” points Left.
“Big end for the big number” is less arbitrary than trying to remember stuff about letters or alligators.
The ‘big end/small end’ thing is more than coincidence, isn’t it? I mean, the symbol is the shape it is because it’s describing a change in size, isn’t it?
ETA: I mean in the same way the volume labelling on thisthing is supposed to be intuitive.
yeah, but its get confusing for some people, maybe because they are storing both < and > in the same bucket in their brain , and so they recall both when they see one or the other. (My grand mother , at a time after she had suffered a few strokes, and was getting frail and barely there, saw a picture of Angkor Wat and said “I know where that is, that is Canada!”… In her brain, Canada and Cambodia are stored in the bucket labelled “Countries starting with C and then A !” )
So how about " L L L " … Little Left Less ! As long as you can remember LLL and your left and right… Little on the Left is Less THAN ! LLL !
I always think of < > as a hungry crocodile (or its mouth…). As it is a hungry crocodile, its mouth will always face the biggest value.
Like Mangetout, I’ve always essentially seen as a representation of the process going from one thing to the other—for ‘<’ it’s a process of growth, hence the small value is on the left, the bigger one on the right, while for ‘>’ it’s a shrinking process.
This isn’t an easy way to remember, it’s a direct translation, but I just think of a line of numbers in reading order:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
And the < arrow points to the lesser numbers for Less Than, and the > arrow points to the greater numbers for Greater Than. It’s a very logical choice for symbols, in my mind.
Of course in musical notation, “<” means crescendo, or *increase *volume, while “>” is decrescendo, or *decrease *volume. This difference with music and math notation has confused me for years!
I’m interested that this is considered tricky by some - I always thought of it as inherently obvious: “Big end is big, small end is small”.
Because it is change over time. The big end (louder) to the left, becoming smaller (quieter) to the right describes de crescendo.
Makes sense if you think of time passing as you move from left to right (the way most languages - and presumably most musical notations - are read). Thus, “<” means “volume increasing with time”.
But that’s exactly the same usage: notes to the left of ‘<’ are played on a smaller volume than notes to the right, i.e. going from left to right, the volume has increased—crescendo, while notes to the left of ‘>’ are played at a larger volume than notes to the right, so that again going from left to right, the volume has decreased—decrescendo.
Another way to think of it is the number of “points” on each end. The < symbol has one point on the left, and two on the right. One is less than two.
The > symbol has two points on the left, and one on the right. Two is greater than one.
That’s what our 7th-grade math teacher taught us.
I was taught the crocodile mouth thing, the greedy crocodile mouth always wants the bigger meal.
My brother was taught that it was a finger tip, and that it was always picking on the little guy.
In the case of the mathematical symbol, it reads the correct meaning in either direction - when you read “4 > 3” from right to left, you get “3 < 4” - assuming you interpret the symbol as one representing change across its width.