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Comment by tenzero | Hacker News Reader

Well perhaps I delivered the statement poorly. My intent is not to troll, I detest Trolls.

The convention I have seen is to use the symbol of an arrow such as -> to denote the concept of approaching.

However I did state I was being pedantic.

Considering when you created your account, and the subject of your post, "troll" seemed like the most likely explanation. Sorry about that. (It's sort of a typical troll to make a technically incorrect statement and then watch people get all agitated as they correct you. In fact, it's one of my favorite trolls, right behind making a sarcastic statement which you know will be taken literally by half of the audience, a la "A Modest Proposal".)

Anyways, assuming that your comment was in earnest, the arrow is typically used for functions (or sequences). E.g.,

  1/n -> 0 as n->infinity

You could write:

  1/4 + 1/16 + ... + 1/4^n -> 1/3

But you would write

  1/4 + 1/16 + ... = 1/3

You wouldn't write (or at least I've never seen it)

  1/4 + 1/16 + ... -> 1/3

It's not really a mathematical issue, just a definitional one: the left hand side is considered a real number, not a sequence of real numbers (or function :N->R, or whatever).

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