From: Joshua Zucker <joshua.zucker@stanfordalumni.org>
To: Teacher2Teacher Public Discussion
Date: 2001040405:21:21
Subject: Meaning of "triple equals"

I've seen triple equals used, as mentioned by others, for
"congruent mod" with a subscript indicating mod what.

I've also seen the use others have mentioned, meaning "equivalent"
or "identically equal".

I've seen one other use that it seems nobody else has mentioned:
"is defined to equal".  Some people use ":=" for that instead.

For instance, they'd say f(x) := 3x + 2 to mean that this is
the definition of f(x), as opposed to f(x) = 3x + 2 which might
mean (depending on context, of course!) that we are trying to
find the values of x for which f(x) is equal to 3x + 2.

--Joshua Zucker

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