What is $\gtrless$?

notation

I'm reading Papadimitriou & Steiglitz's Combinatorial Optimization and came across notation I'd never seen before and don't know what it means. The $\LaTeX$ markup for it is \gtrless ($\gtrless$), which took me quite a while to find.

It arises in the formulation of general linear programs in terms of the constraints on the variables:

$$ x_j \geq 0 \;\; j \in N\\ x_j \gtrless 0 \;\; j \in \bar{N} $$

It's not "not equals" because there's places in the text where the authors say $x$ can be zero.

Solution 1:

According to this blog entry (jingjinyu.wordpress.com/2011/02/06/…), which quotes the same section of the same text, saying that $x_j \gtrless 0$ just means that $x_j$ can be any real number. And as pointed out in the text, such variables can be eliminated by introducing two non-negative auxiliary variables: $x_j=x_j'-x_j''$ with $x_j'\ge 0$ and $x_j''\ge 0$.

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