The greater-than sign is a mathematical symbol that denotes an
inequality
Inequality may refer to:
Economics
* Attention inequality, unequal distribution of attention across users, groups of people, issues in etc. in attention economy
* Economic inequality, difference in economic well-being between population groups
* ...
between two values. The widely adopted form of two equal-length strokes connecting in an acute angle at the right, , has been found in documents dated as far back as the 1560s. In mathematical writing, the greater-than sign is typically placed between two values being compared and signifies that the first number is greater than the second number. Examples of typical usage include ''1.5 > 1'' and ''1 > −2''. The less-than sign and greater-than sign always "point" to the smaller number. Since the development of computer
programming language
A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language.
The description of a programming ...
s, the greater-than sign and the
less-than sign have been repurposed for a range of uses and operations.
History
The earliest known use of the symbols and is found in (''The Analytical Arts Applied to Solving Algebraic Equations'') by
Thomas Harriot
Thomas Harriot (; – 2 July 1621), also spelled Harriott, Hariot or Heriot, was an English astronomer, mathematician, ethnographer and translator to whom the theory of refraction is attributed. Thomas Harriot was also recognized for his con ...
, published posthumously in 1631. The text states: " a > b a b (The sign of majority a > b indicates that a is greater than b)" and " a < b a b (The sign of minority a < b indicates that a is less than b)."
According to historian Art Johnson, while Harriot was surveying North America, he saw a
Native American with a symbol that resembled the greater-than sign, in both backwards and forwards forms.
[ Johnson, Art. "History of Mathematical Symbols". Classic Math: History Topics for the Classroom. Dale Seymour Publications, 1994.] Johnson says it is likely Harriot developed the two symbols from this symbol.
[
]
Computing
The 'greater-than sign' is an original ASCII
ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because of ...
character (hex 3E, decimal 62).
The Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...
code point
In character encoding terminology, a code point, codepoint or code position is a numerical value that maps to a specific character. Code points usually represent a single grapheme—usually a letter, digit, punctuation mark, or whitespace—but ...
is ; this is inherited from the same allocation in ASCII
ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because of ...
.
Angle brackets
The greater-than sign is sometimes used for an approximation of the closing angle bracket, . The proper Unicode character is . ASCII does not have angular brackets.
Programming language
BASIC and C-family languages (including Java
Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...
and C++
C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...
) use the comparison operator
In computer science, a relational operator is a programming language construct or Operator (programming), operator that tests or defines some kind of relation (mathematics), relation between Binary function, two entities. These include numerica ...
to mean "greater than". In Lisp-family languages, is a function used to mean "greater than".
In Coldfusion and Fortran, operator means "greater than".
Double greater-than sign
The double greater-than sign, , is used for an approximation of the '' much-greater-than sign'' . ASCII does not have the much greater-than sign.
The double greater-than sign is also used for an approximation of the closing guillemet
Guillemets (, also , , ) are a pair of punctuation marks in the form of sideways double chevrons, and , used as quotation marks in a number of languages. In some of these languages "single" guillemets, and , are used for a quotation inside a ...
, .
In Java
Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...
, C, and C++
C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...
, the operator is the right-shift operator. In C++ it is also used to get input from a stream
A stream is a continuous body of water, body of surface water Current (stream), flowing within the stream bed, bed and bank (geography), banks of a channel (geography), channel. Depending on its location or certain characteristics, a stream ...
, similar to the C functions and .
In Haskell
Haskell () is a general-purpose, statically-typed, purely functional programming language with type inference and lazy evaluation. Designed for teaching, research and industrial applications, Haskell has pioneered a number of programming lan ...
, the function is a monadic operator. It is used for sequentially composing two actions, discarding any value produced by the first. In that regard, it is like the statement sequencing operator in imperative languages, such as the semicolon in C.
In XPath
XPath (XML Path Language) is an expression language designed to support the query or transformation of XML documents. It was defined by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and can be used to compute values (e.g., strings, numbers, or Boolean v ...
the operator returns true if the left operand follows the right operand in document order; otherwise it returns false.
Triple greater-than sign
The triple greater-than sign, , is the unsigned-right-shift operator in JavaScript
JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...
. Three greater-than signs form the distinctive prompt of the firmware console in MicroVAX
The MicroVAX is a discontinued family of low-cost minicomputers developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). The first model, the MicroVAX I, was introduced in 1983.(announced October 1983) They used processors that implemen ...
, VAXstation
The VAXstation is a discontinued family of workstation computers developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation using processors implementing the VAX instruction set architecture. VAXstation systems were typically shipped with eithe ...
, and DEC Alpha
Alpha (original name Alpha AXP) is a 64-bit reduced instruction set computer (RISC) instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Alpha was designed to replace 32-bit VAX complex instruction set compute ...
computers (known as the SRM console in the latter). This is also the default prompt of the Python
Python may refer to:
Snakes
* Pythonidae, a family of nonvenomous snakes found in Africa, Asia, and Australia
** ''Python'' (genus), a genus of Pythonidae found in Africa and Asia
* Python (mythology), a mythical serpent
Computing
* Python (pro ...
interactive shell, often seen for code examples that can be executed interactively in the interpreter:
$ python
Python 3.9.2 (default, Feb 20 2021, 18:40:11)
CC 10.2.0on linux
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> print("Hello World")
Hello World
>>>
Greater-than sign with equals sign
The greater-than sign plus the equals sign, , is sometimes used for an approximation of the greater than or equal to
In mathematics, an inequality is a relation which makes a non-equal comparison between two numbers or other mathematical expressions. It is used most often to compare two numbers on the number line by their size. There are several different ...
sign, which was not included in the ASCII repertoire. The sign is, however, provided in Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...
, as .
In BASIC, Lisp-family languages, and C-family languages (including Java
Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's List ...
and C++
C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...
), operator means "greater than or equal to". In Sinclair BASIC it is encoded as a single-byte code point token.
In Fortran, operator means "greater than or equal to".
In Bourne shell and Windows PowerShell
PowerShell is a task automation and configuration management program from Microsoft, consisting of a command-line shell and the associated scripting language. Initially a Windows component only, known as Windows PowerShell, it was made open-so ...
, the operator means "greater than or equal to".
In Lua
Lua or LUA may refer to:
Science and technology
* Lua (programming language)
* Latvia University of Agriculture
* Last universal ancestor, in evolution
Ethnicity and language
* Lua people, of Laos
* Lawa people, of Thailand sometimes referred t ...
, operator means "greater than or equal to" and is used like this
x = math.random(1,9)
y = 5
if x >= y then
print("x("..x..") is more or equal to y("..y..")")
else
print("x("..x..") is less than y("..y..")")
end
''expected output:''
x(number >= 5) is more or equal to y(5)
or
x(number < 5) is less than y(5)
Hyphen-minus with greater-than sign
In some programming languages (for example F#), the greater-than sign is used in conjunction with a hyphen-minus to create an arrow (). Arrows like these could also be used in text where other arrow symbols are unavailable. In the R programming language
R is a programming language for statistical computing and graphics supported by the R Core Team and the R Foundation for Statistical Computing. Created by statisticians Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman, R is used among data miners, bioinforma ...
, this can be used as the right assignment operator. In the C, C++
C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...
, and C# programming languages, this is used as a member access operator. In Swift
Swift or SWIFT most commonly refers to:
* SWIFT, an international organization facilitating transactions between banks
** SWIFT code
* Swift (programming language)
* Swift (bird), a family of birds
It may also refer to:
Organizations
* SWIFT, ...
, it is used to indicate the return value type when defining a function
Function or functionality may refer to:
Computing
* Function key, a type of key on computer keyboards
* Function model, a structured representation of processes in a system
* Function object or functor or functionoid, a concept of object-oriente ...
(i.e., func foo() -> MyClass
).
Shell scripts
In Bourne shell (and many other shells), greater-than sign is used to redirect
Redirect and its variants (e.g., redirection) may refer to:
Arts, entertainment, and media
* ''Redirect'', 2012 Christian metal album and its title track by Your Memorial
* ''Redirected'' (film), a 2014 action comedy film
Computing
* ICMP R ...
output to a file. Greater-than plus ampersand () is used to redirect to a file descriptor.
Spaceship operator
Greater-than sign is used in the 'spaceship operator
In computer science, a three-way comparison takes two values A and B belonging to a type with a total order and determines whether A < B, A = B, or A > B in a single operation, in accordance with the mathematical law of trichotomy.
Machine ...
', .
HTML
In HTML
The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaSc ...
(and SGML and XML
Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable ...
), the greater-than sign is used at the end of tags. The greater-than sign may be included with , while produces the greater-than or equal to sign.
E-mail and Markdown
In some early e-mail
Electronic mail (email or e-mail) is a method of exchanging messages ("mail") between people using electronic devices. Email was thus conceived as the electronic (digital) version of, or counterpart to, mail, at a time when "mail" meant ...
systems, the greater-than sign was used to denote quotation
A quotation is the repetition of a sentence, phrase, or passage from speech or text that someone has said or written. In oral speech, it is the representation of an utterance (i.e. of something that a speaker actually said) that is introduced by ...
s.
The sign is also used to denote quotations in Markdown
Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor. John Gruber and Aaron Swartz created Markdown in 2004 as a markup language that is appealing to human readers in its source code form. Markdown i ...
.
See also
* Inequality (mathematics)
* Less-than sign
*Relational operator
In computer science, a relational operator is a programming language construct or operator that tests or defines some kind of relation between two entities. These include numerical equality (''e.g.'', ) and inequalities (''e.g.'', ).
In pr ...
*Mathematical operators and symbols in Unicode
The Unicode Standard encodes almost all standard characters used in mathematics.
Unicode Technical Report #25 provides comprehensive information about the character repertoire, their properties, and guidelines for implementation.
Mathematical op ...
*Guillemet
Guillemets (, also , , ) are a pair of punctuation marks in the form of sideways double chevrons, and , used as quotation marks in a number of languages. In some of these languages "single" guillemets, and , are used for a quotation inside a ...
*Material conditional
The material conditional (also known as material implication) is an operation commonly used in logic. When the conditional symbol \rightarrow is interpreted as material implication, a formula P \rightarrow Q is true unless P is true and Q i ...
References
{{Reflist
Typographical symbols
Mathematical symbols
Inequalities