Introduction to Inequalities

Inequality tells you about the relative size of two values.

Mathematics is not always about "equals"! Sometimes you only know that something is bigger or smaller

Example: Alex and Billy have a race, and Billy wins!

What do we know?

We don't know how fast they ran, but we do know that Billy was faster than Alex:

Billy was faster than Alex

We can write that down like this:

b > a

(Where "b" means how fast Billy was, ">" means "greater than", and "a" means how fast Alex was)

Greater or Less Than

The two most common inequalities are:

Symbol	Words	Example Use
>	greater than	5 > 2
<	less than	7 < 9
		. Or Equal To! You can also have inequalities that include "equals", like: Symbol Words Example Use ≥ greater than or equal to x ≥ 1 ≤ less than or equal to y ≤ 3