It never stops

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!
- 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.
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?
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:

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.
But the pointy end should be pointing. This phrasing could get confusing.

in other words:

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.

How childish!

It's obviously Pac-Man.

I learned "L" for Less than

And Г is for greater than?
- That's co<<ect.
- or _|?

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.

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 know someone who did their entire thesis purposely without using effect/affect, because they didn't know the difference. Instead used "impact" and other similar words.

Affect is an action and effect just exists is how I always remembered it.
- that's a lot better than my method of remembering that effect is not a verb
I can only imagine the impact that had on the end result's impact. Probably didn't have the impact they wanted on the readers who were unimpacted by the message.

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"

I saw the angles and assumed this was a joke about Dirac notation, which I'm still convinced is a massive joke to get mathematical physicists seriously talking about bras and ket in the staff room.

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.

SOHCAHTOA

Sock it to 'er? I hardly know 'er!
Silly Old Harry caught a herring trawling off Anglesey.

I still think "Pervert Naruto" for PV=nRT

I always think that less than 3 makes a heart <3

And "three larger than" makes a funny-looking face or a sexy bikini. 3>

Do they teach this in Primary School now? I’d have thought it was still addition, subtraction, timetables, long division etc; I first encountered these symbols learning BASIC at home.

I started elementary school in 1999, yes absolutely.

I have to read random passwords to people, nobody knows which is the greater (>) and less (<) than symbol.

Related: https://xkcd.com/936/
Because they are all just knowing it points to the bigger number. >100 and 100< are interchangeable.
- uhh... doesn't it point to the smaller number?
When I encounter this, I have to imagine a context as I would read it. eg. X > Y as X is greater than Y. Because <> are just angle brackets to me.

What made the symbols finally click for me is drawing a small number line with the arrows on either end and erasing the line.

In Dutch the word for smaller is kleiner.

So I always think, can it make the letter K

2 < 3 2 smaller than 3 < K

no K

???
- I think the formatting is weird, it should have looked like this (hopefully that makes more sense)
  So smaller than looks like a K,.greater than does not look like a K.

When I was first learning these symbols in kindergarten, I understood how to use them, but I couldn't read them right. If I saw 2 < 3 and had to say what it was out loud, I'd say "3 is greater than 2." I learned the proper way quickly though with some help from my teach though. No idea why that memory stuck with me.

I still hear my kindergarten teacher's voice every time I look at an analog clock..."little hand points the hour"

I learnt it the exact same way! 😄

I learned it as Pacman. You could draw the rest of the circle and put a little eye in there.

The greedy bird eats the biggest number

lots of food > not much food

This never made sense. The larger animal would eat the smaller one.

The crocodile wants to eat the larger child

Most Indonesian school teach to use use it like l> "besar" and l< "kecil". Besar = big, kecil = small

I find the metaphors stupid when most of us can just look at the symbol: the vertex side has less distance between segments than the open side.

When I write proofs, I hate using both < & >, because the redundant complexity of juggling both orders slows me down. Just sticking to a single order like < ≤ and arranging values in that single order eased reasoning quite a bit.