Bracket (mathematics) - Floor/ceiling Functions and Fractional Part

Floor/ceiling Functions and Fractional Part

Square brackets, as in = 3, are sometimes used to denote the floor function, which rounds a real number down to the next integer. However the floor and ceiling functions are usually typeset with left and right square brackets where the upper (for floor function) or lower (for ceiling function) horizontal bars are missing, as in or .

Curly brackets, as in {π} < 1/7, may denote the fractional part of a real number.

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