Anecdotally quite a few people who are otherwise comfortable with prefix math in Clojure get confused by < and >. To resolve this you may find it useful to mentally rename them to strictly increasing and strictly decreasing. Not only does this straighten out confusion surrounding binary < and > it makes unary (always results in true) and other n-ary forms easier to understand too. <= and >= are respectively monotonically increasing and monotonically decreasing.