# How to increase the size of a curly bracket size without \left and \right

I would like to ask how to increase the dimension of the curly bracket in the second item of the following list:

\begin{enumerate}
\item Draw $\tilde{\theta}$ from $j$
\item Calculate $\nu = \min \{ {\frac{p(\theta^{k}+\tilde{\theta})}{p(\theta^{k})},1} \}$
\item With probability of $\nu$, put $\theta^{k+1}=\theta^{k}+\tilde{\theta}$, otherwise put $\theta^{k+1}= \theta$
\end{enumerate}


I tried by adding \left{ and \right} as follows

\item Calculate $\nu = \min \left{ {\frac{p(\theta^{k}+\tilde{\theta})}{p(\theta^{k})},1} \right}$


but I still receive an error message.

I would be very grateful if someone could provide me with suggestions in this respect.

-
Welcome to TeX.sx! You don't have to sign with your name since it automatically appears in the lower right corner of your post. A tip: If you indent lines by 4 spaces, they'll be marked as a code sample. You can also highlight the code and click the "code" button (with "{}" on it). –  egreg Feb 26 '13 at 11:58
Use \left\{ and \right\}. –  Alex Feb 26 '13 at 12:01
What Alex said. Since braces are special characters in TeX, they need to be 'escaped' wherever they occur. @Alex, I'd post that as the answer. –  Sean Allred Feb 26 '13 at 15:27
@Alex Do you want to write an answer? –  Torbjørn T. Jan 4 '14 at 21:53

Curly braces are special characters in TeX. To print them, they need to be escaped with a backslash (as you did in the first code fragment). The same holds for combinations with \left/\right, or \big and so on, i.e., you should use \left\{ and \right\}.