When I type \leq, it shows up as if I had typed \le. How do I do the actual less-than-equals (>=) sign? Edit: I typed \leq and the output symbol was >, but I want >=. I am also using the site sharelatex.com as my editor. I think something was wrong with sharelatex, as when I closed my project and reopened, everything was fine.
Why does \leq show up as \le? - TeX - LaTeX Stack Exchange
Compared to ≤ / ≦ the macro versions \leq / \leqq are (probably) easier to type for most people and require only US-ASCII characters (which is most likely the reason why older documents predating the triumph of Unicode only use those forms: ≤ / ≦ wasn't an option back then).
so the pairs \le, \leq, and \ge, \geq are equivalent in standard LaTeX. As you can see, \ge and \geq are just different names for the same object (and similarly for \le and \leq). Both \ge and \geq stand for "greater than or equal to" and both \le and \leq stand for "less than or equal to".
Here is what I get: I don't get it because I thought \le and \leq were exactly the same. And in all my documents (there are many), I used \leq.
The symbols \leq (\le) and \leqslant have exactly the same meaning; similarly for \geq (\ge) and \geqslant. The preference for one or the other is basically subjective, but this is also affected by the house styles of major publishers of mathematics, which presumably traces back to the founding editors of journals handled by those publishers.