Talk:Approximate inequality

Latest comment: 2 years ago by JayBeeEll in topic Title of this page

Title of this page

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To me the title of this page, "Approximate inequality" doesn't make sense (and frankly, it sounds made up). How is "several orders of magnitude smaller/greater" approximate? And I don't see how splitting this out of Inequality (mathematics) is going to help our readers. —Tea2min (talk) 07:19, 20 November 2021 (UTC)Reply

Yeah, the title sounds weird to me, too. I don't think it's a standard term. I would have guessed that an "approximate inequality" is an inequality in which the bound is only determined approximately, e.g., a bound calculated from dimensional analysis. We shouldn't be using jargon we make up ourselves, and on top of that, I don't think this is a topic that needs its own article. Honestly, it made more sense where it came from, though it's possible there's an even better place for it than that. XOR'easter (talk) 03:16, 21 November 2021 (UTC)Reply
I agree. This page should be deleted and reincorporated with wherever it came from. PatrickR2 (talk) 05:31, 21 November 2021 (UTC)Reply
It's odd because there is obviously a unicode for this notion so somebody thinks it's standard, but without higher-quality sources it's hard to figure out what it is supposed to mean. Also, the "much greater than" and "much less than" symbols are not really approximate as inequalities go, they are more a strengthened form of an inequality. —David Eppstein (talk) 07:32, 21 November 2021 (UTC)Reply
In my experience it’s surprisingly common for people to confuse the phrase “asymptotic inequality” (a precise notion, for which this symbol is sometimes used) with “approximate inequality”, and I suspect that’s what has happened here. —JBL (talk) 13:03, 21 November 2021 (UTC)Reply