How to find a min/max with Ruby

You can do

[5, 10].min

or

[4, 7].max

They come from the Enumerable module, so anything that includes Enumerable will have those methods available.

v2.4 introduces own Array#min and Array#max, which are way faster than Enumerable's methods because they skip calling #each.

@nicholasklick mentions another option, Enumerable#minmax, but this time returning an array of [min, max].

[4, 5, 7, 10].minmax
=> [4, 10]

You can use

[5,10].min 

or

[4,7].max

It's a method for Arrays.

All those results generate garbage in a zealous attempt to handle more than two arguments. I'd be curious to see how they perform compared to good 'ol:

def max (a,b)
  a>b ? a : b
end

which is, by-the-way, my official answer to your question.

If you need to find the max/min of a hash, you can use #max_by or #min_by

people = {'joe' => 21, 'bill' => 35, 'sally' => 24}

people.min_by { |name, age| age } #=> ["joe", 21]
people.max_by { |name, age| age } #=> ["bill", 35]