What are the $\succ$ and $\prec$ operators for when used with matrices?

Solution 1:

Often, the relation $A \succ B$ is used to indicate "$A - B$" is positive definite.

My guess is that $A \succ 7.3$ means $A \succ 7.3 I$; that is, "$A$ is symmetric, and its eigenvalues are strictly greater than $7.3$."

Solution 2:

Unfortunately I cannot answer your question completely. But I can answer the last one. The name of this operator is succeed. You can see all names of this math operator and its relation from this latex code, given below:

http://www.access2science.com/latex/Binary.html