You’re staring at a screen. Maybe it’s a line of code, a math homework assignment, or a spreadsheet that won’t stop throwing errors. There it is: the greater than sign. It’s just a little "v" shape knocked over on its side, but for some reason, it’s one of the most confusing symbols in the history of human communication. Honestly, don't feel bad. Even seasoned developers sometimes have a "wait, which way is it pointing?" moment when they're tired at 3:00 AM.
The symbol looks like this: $>$.
In its simplest form, the greater than sign is a mathematical indicator used to show that the number on the left has a higher value than the number on the right. It’s the visual representation of "bigger." If you write $10 > 5$, you’re basically making a statement of fact. Ten is more than five. Simple, right? But as you move from elementary school arithmetic into the worlds of computer science, data filtering, and logical expressions, this little wedge starts doing some heavy lifting.
💡 You might also like: Why You Can ThinkPad: The Real Reason These Boxy Laptops Still Have a Cult Following
The Origin Story: Where Did This Thing Come From?
We didn't always have a tidy little symbol for this. For centuries, mathematicians just wrote out the words in Latin. It was tedious. Imagine having to write maior quam every single time you wanted to say one number was bigger than another.
The greater than sign as we know it today didn't actually show up until 1631. It made its debut in a book called Artis Analyticae Praxis, written by Thomas Harriot. Harriot was an interesting guy—an English astronomer and mathematician who was actually the first person to draw a map of the moon using a telescope, beating Galileo to the punch.
📖 Related: Richard Trevithick and the First Steam Train Invented: Why History Almost Forgot Him
Why a wedge? Harriot didn't leave a diary entry explaining his design choices, but the logic is pretty intuitive. The symbol has a wide end and a narrow end. The "big" side points to the bigger number, and the "small" point points to the smaller number. It’s a literal representation of scale.
Why We Get It Backwards
It's the "alligator" problem.
👉 See also: Netflix Error Code M7111-1935: Why It Happens and How to Kick It
You probably remember your second-grade teacher telling you that the symbol is an alligator’s mouth, and the alligator is hungry, so he always eats the bigger number. While that's a cute mnemonic device, it actually messes people up later in life. Why? Because it focuses on the action of the symbol rather than the reading of it.
When we read English, we go from left to right. When you hit the symbol $>$, you hit the wide opening first. That's why we say "greater than." If you were to see $<$, you’d hit the tiny point first, which is why that one is "less than." Forget the alligator. Just look at what part of the symbol your eyes hit first as you scan across the page.
More Than Just Math: The Symbol in Modern Tech
If you think the greater than sign is just for kids learning their times tables, you're missing about 90% of its utility. In the 21st century, this symbol is a structural pillar of the internet.
Take HTML, for example. Without the greater than and less than signs, the web literally wouldn't exist. They are the "brackets" that hold tags together. When you write `