Wait… was I the only one that got taught: small number on the small side, big number on the big side?
No cute little metaphor, just deal with the bleakness of the world, kids!
This is like when I found out everybody else got a cute little song to memorize the quadratic equation.
Whaaat?? Gimme the song!
To the tune of “Pop Goes the Weasel”
X equals the opposite of B Plus or minus square root B squared minus 4 A C All over 2 A!
🤯💃🕺
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOXYMRcWbF8
This is the tune.
In Germany, we have this. At least I think that quadratic formula means the ABC Formel? If not, I’m sure dorfuchs has a video for it too.
My favorite is the one for the bionische Formeln.
That’s much better than anything we have in the U.S.
Wow. Your school hated you if you didn’t learn about the alligator or crocodile.
Not even a mention of the duck!
The version I was taught starts with the equals sign. There is nothing simpler to depict the concept of equality than two parallel lines of the same length. Now pinch one side to spoil the equalness, the pinched side points to the smaller number in the unequal pair.
That’s so much more work than just remembering the gator wants to eat more.
I’m so sorry for you that you didn’t have a childhood
I imagine that is how the symbol came to be used. I doubt they imagined crocodiles.
When this symbol was formalized crocodiles were a much more persistent and immediate threat. They thought about them constantly.
I was just taught this is the symbol for bigger than and this is the symbol for less than. And we remembered them the same way we remember the letters and the numbers and all the other symbols like addition and subtraction. No need to think about it, just “<” and “less than” are equivalent in my mind.
I really don’t get why you would need a mnemonic for a symbol that itself already is a mnemonic? How could it ever be confusing that big side is bigger than small side?
Because the arrow always points to the bigger number, silly. /S
She just wants to say she is writing a PhD thesis in theoretical physics.
Because everyone’s brain is different and things that make intuitive sense for one person don’t necessarily make the same sense to someone else.
Yes, and that’s why they made the symbol portray what it means. I mean it’s even more clear than the equal sign, yet I haven’t heard of mnemonic’s for that?
Because there aren’t (in common use) multiple variations. If we used ≠ and ≈ to represent when the sum was arrived at via addition or subtraction, and only used = when you used both in the same equation, people would fuck that shit up all the time.
Also, you use the equal sign a lot more frequently in life. More exposure makes us remember better
Right? How hard is it to remember that it’s an arrow that points at the biggest number? /s
I remember learning about these in first grade and the explanation we got was “the beak of the little chick is pointing towards the bigger number” and I can’t stress how much more confusing an explaination that is compared to the crocodile. Picture the following scene:
O> \0/ / \Yes that’s a bird shut up. Observe the beak. Where is it pointing in this case? That’s right, it’s pointing the wrong way. Why did they choose this stupid explaination? Who knooooows
What in the fuck kind of backwards ass logic is that?! CROCO GO NOM NOM ON BIGGY NUMBER BECAUSE HE HUNGY! What is wrong with your teacher, my god
Pretty sure they were going for this, not a baby bird just standing there:
Oh I understand what they were going for, not the issue I have though haha
yes as it turned out in about 10 minutes, but the picture she was trying to paint wasn’t very clear to me until then
big > small
as in the symbol is big and open on one side and small and closed on the other. It could not possibly be more literal than that.That was not how it was taught to my developing elementary brain.
Sure, but if you regularly use it, wouldn’t you think more about the symbol?
And wouldn’t it make more sense to an adult brain to see one side wider and one side smaller and continue the line in order to understand which size is bigger?
YES!
Read left to right, they make perfect sense:
Less than is <
Greater than is >
They all make visual sense:
=
≠
±
<
My teacher said “Pac-Man wants to eat the number that gives him the highest score” and that sooo stuck with me
Why not just remember that the bigger side of the symbol points to the bigger number?
Sounds like a less fun version of the same rule.
rule
Calling that a rule is weird. Like do you have a rule which side of the knife is used to cut? Which part of the toothbrush goes in your mouth? You don’t? Right, cause it’s entirely obvious.
It’s more of a consensus, than a rule. It’s only obvious because of the way we phrase it and the consensus to use that symbol. But we could’ve just as well settled on something like “x follows y” or whatever and you’d have an arrow pointing at the bigger number. Or any other number of ways to compare without using that symbol exactly. It’s more a language than anything, really. What’s important is that everyone understands the same thing regardless of what symbol we use. That’s why everyone uses it like that, not because it’s obvious.
Rule rule.
( ಠ‿< )
But the pointy end should be pointing. This phrasing could get confusing.
in other words:
How childish!
It’s obviously Pac-Man.
I used to even draw in the teeth.
I think I was fifteen when my maths teacher took me aside and told me my less-than symbol didn’t need a plover bird.
I learned “L” for Less than
And Г is for greater than?
or _|?
We will never know
That’s co<<ect.
“gгeater than”
I feel this deeply as a 30 year old that has to repeat in my head “Never Eat Soggy Waffles” every time I use a cardinal direction
When I taught math to young students I used alligators…Muh haa/0/
****I’m leaving the random characters that have been added to my evil laugh. They were added by Zip the orange 3 month old terror kitten
Zip pic where?
At her innocent best.
Zip bomb!
Aw, she’s super sweet! Your printer did a great job😉
I’ve always found it interesting that many people have a hard time remembering this. I feel like it’s one of those self-describing symbols.
I am also an idiot who needs mnemonics to remember incredibly basic stuff. In a similar vein to OOP, I did a PhD in chemistry with substantial involvement with chiral structures and still don’t really know left from right… but I never understood this one. Smaller number on the small side, bigger number on the big side always seemed really intuitive.
Also in a theoretical physics context I think of those symbols as Dirac notation more often than inequalities, but then I’m not a physicist.
Bra-Kets are have much shallower angles and inequalities are still used widely in physics
Fair. There’s a reason I barely scraped through introductory quantum.
I just use both with a footnote that reads “one of these symbols always lies, one tells the truth. Determining which is which left as an exercise for the reader”
