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.
I suppose it gets easier if you read it from left to right, which kids tend not to do at first for some reason. At least not my kids.
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. 👍
I got a zero on a math test in second grade because I said “the bigger number is on the bigger side” instead of “the crocodile wants to eat the bigger number”, fuck you 2nd grade math teacher who made me hate math by being the thought police.
It is my firm belief that teachers who force you to regurgitate the textbook answer verbatim should be promptly sacked. They are only teaching you to obey authority figures without questioning, and we don’t need any more toadies in this world.
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…
“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
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.
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.
No, since it’s bigger it stretches the lines apart :)
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
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.
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.
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
Didn’t know so many people had trouble with this. To me they’re as different as b and d. Never had to think about it
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
I had no idea that people struggled with this so much and have come up with such crazy (to me) ways of figuring it out.
Most of the world, if asked to write down numbers 1-100 on a line, would do so left to right. The < and > symbols are arrows pointing left and right. To the left the numbers decrease (less than) and to the right the numbers increase (greater than).
All this stuff about crocodiles and ducks seems like such a bizarre way to remember it!
Edit: thanks for the comments, it’s fascinating to get an insight on how differently people’s brains work. Something that seems like such an obvious concept is just as baffling to others as the crocodile is for me.
To attempt to explain it better though: Say the number you’re comparing to is 50. If x is less than that, say 30, then it would appear to the left of 50 in the list and the arrow would point that way <–. If it’s greater than 50 then it would be to the right -->
Yes, but that’s because that’s the way your mind interpreted it, it could have just as easily thought that the arrow (little side) should point in the forward direction from left to right, so ‘point to the bigger number’.
Basically two completely unrelated things both make sense to you in the same direction, and that happened to be the direction that the the people picking the symbols also picked. If they had simply picked the opposite direction, all the people who currently struggle might find out perfectly natural and be confused as to why ‘you’ have such a problem understanding it.
you say that but your method is only just as intuitive lol, wild how many methods work.
Your explanation is no less crazy lol.
A mnemonic device is a mnemonic device.
I think about how the symbols have two sides, one is a point (small side) and the other is wide (big side)
Here’s a wild thought: inequalities are not always written with the lower number on the left… or there wouldn’t be a need for two symbols.
My Mama says that alligators are ornery because they got all them teeth and no toothbrush
If you see it as a function of height, the left side of < has a smaller height than the right side
I never understood why so many people seemingly struggle with these signs to the point they need a mnemonic. The big side points to the big number and the small side to the small one. What even is there to remember?
Look at Dr. Postdoc here
As a kid I saw it as an arrow pointing, it points to the small number. That’s how I remembered it. I can now understand it ‘facing’ the big number but it was never pointing any direction other than the point, which is to the smaller one. Now I understand it eats the bigger one but it took awhile to see it as anything but an arrow point, if they drew them with teeth I’d have understood the eating better as a kid but I don’t think any teacher did that. I never had trouble understanding overall so wasn’t an issue.
What you describe is a mnemonic.
Technically. That’s not the point, though. The symbol itself has a built in mnemonic; it’s designed so you can’t forget what it means. If you wanna be pedantic, which, fair enough, we’re talking about math notation after all, add “different” before “mnemonic” in the original comment and the point still stands.
Yeah, the symbol is the mnemonic. What does the crocodile even explain? Why doesn’t the bigger number eat the smaller numbers?
Yeah the worst part about mnemonics like this is that its easy to think to yourself “crap, does the crocodile eat the bigger number or the smaller number?”
Never been a fan of mnemonics that can be easily flipped because my brain loves to troll me. When I noticed/heard larger side larger number, this was the only way I ever saw it again.
Yeah. It would be like saying “Oh, when I see a stop sign, I think to myself they’re the same colour a traffic light turns to when you’re supposed to stop, so I remember to stop”
I am 54, and still every fucking time.
Never heard this till this meme, apparently I was under a rock… Or in Florida
Not a meme, just how I was taught to remember greater than / less then operator direction
Yeah I meant the saying from the meme op posted, my bad. We just were taught the bigger side faces the bigger side, smaller smaller. Alligators, Crocodiles, and Pacman I guess we never included in math otherwise we’d startt totalling how many neighborhood dogs got eaten in the retention ponds next door. Like the number 1 unspoken rule of going fishing on the St. Johns River is don’t bring your dog, haha
Also I have seen Lake Jesup sometimes have so many gators eyes at night that you’d think you could cartoon run 13 miles across it and not have to touch water.
Wed nes day
And then here’s me having to have my wife help my daughter with her middle school math assignments because they entirely mystify me.
<3 is “less than three”, and 3 is “three” so logically < is “less than”
“Points at the smaller thing”
Every time I watch a student stall out on inequalities I ask “it’s the crocodile isn’t it?”. Without fail, they’ve got confused by it and as soon as they hear “points at the smaller thing” they have no issues.
