Term for minimum or maximum

Question

I need to ask a user to request either a minimum or maximum value.
What would be the appropriate label for this?
I have considered extremum but I am not sure if this is commonly understood or appropriate.

Example: Is the user interested in a companies lowest or highest stock price over the last 6 months? They will have the option of choosing 'min' or 'max'.

Peter Shor · Accepted Answer

Mathematicians call this either an extremum (plural extrema) or extreme value.
But as you say, this is unlikely to be understood by non-technical users. I doubt that there is a better term for it, however, since mathematicians would probably not have come up with a special word for this if there was an ordinary English word or short phrase that meant the same thing.

I would recommend you just use "maximum or minimum value".

Robusto · Answer

You could refer to the bounds of the range. From NOAD:

bound 2
  noun (often bounds)
  a territorial limit; a boundary : the ancient bounds of the forest.
  • a limitation or restriction on feeling or action : it is not beyond the bounds of  possibility that the issue could arise again | enthusiasm to join the union knew no bounds.
  • technical a limiting value.

The "limiting" value can refer to the upper or lower limit.

Mitch · Answer

A word that can replace both maximum and minimum and be understood correctly in context is

optimum

"The optimum score in golf is 18, from a hole-in-one on every hole."

"The optimum score in darts is 180, all three darts in the triple score area of 20."

Koffee · Answer

Floor and Ceiling value
Where Floor is the lowest value (minimum) (the ground is the limit)
And Ceiling is the highes value(maximum) (the ceiling is the limit)
Although it is slightly different in terms of programming language, it makes sense in all other contexts.

Stuart F · Answer

Extreme is used as a noun to mean highest/lowest value. Merriam-Webster gives among the meanings of extreme "something situated at or marking one end or the other of a range" with example "extremes of heat and cold".
One example is in the UK Met Office's database of weather extremes. The usage is perhaps more common in meteorology/climatology than in some other fields, but here's a paper from 2015 on "forecasting financial extremes".

Term for minimum or maximum

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