Life long learning

While tutoring a class yesterday, a student pointed out something in my solution that was wrong. After so many years of Maths, I discovered that my notation was wrong (at least not conventional). Given the following for example:

5 = 2+3
  < 5+1
  < 6
  < 8

The problem is line 3. By my erronous convention, line 3 read as "5 < 6" (which is true). But I learnt from the student yesterday that it means "5+1 < 6" (which is false by the way). Thanks for that! Now the Algorithms book makes a lot more sense! So it seems that the above is nothing more than "5 = 2+3 < 5+1 < 6 < 8" (which, by the way, is still false).