max

max() is a math library function available in many programming environments which returns the entity of greatest value from two or more candidate values.

Do not use max for questions about the maximal value of a type, e.g. Long.MAX_VALUE, Integer.MAX_VALUE, etc.

Examples

SQL

SQL MAX() function is one of aggregate functions. It returns the largest value of column.

SELECT MAX(column_name) FROM table_name;

Python

In Python, the native max function identifies the largest element of a set (e.g. a list).

>> max([1, 2, 3])
3

Java

In Java we can use java.lang.Math class to compute maximum value of two arguments.

int maxElement = Math.max(x, y);

To compute maximum element in collection we can use, max() method from java.util.Collections class.

int maxElement = Collections.max(list);

Ruby

In Ruby to compute maximum element of collection we simply use max function.

[4,7].max

Clojure

In Clojure we use max function in the following way.

(max 1 2 3 4)

In above code max is the function name and numbers 1..4 are arguments passed to it. We can also apply the max function to lists.

(apply max [1 2 3 4])

R

In R we have function max.

x <- c(1, 2, 3)
y <- c(4, 5)
z <- c(6, NA)
max(x)
max(y)
max(z)
max(z, na.rm = TRUE)
max(x, y, z, na.rm = TRUE)  ## as same as max(c(x, y, z), na.rm = TRUE)

Rust

In Rust we can use std::cmp::max to compute the maximum value of two arguments.

let max = std::cmp::max(x, y);

We can compute the maximum element in a collection by transforming it into an Iterator and then calling the max method on the iterator.

let max = collection.into_iter().max();