• @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      2
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      Just look at those viral math problems. I recently saw one that was something like (1+2*3)*(1*0) and most comments were arguing if it was 7 or 9

      • glibg10b
        link
        fedilink
        English
        21 year ago

        I think you mean (1+2*3)*(1*0).

        Escape your asterisks, kids.

          • glibg10b
            link
            fedilink
            English
            21 year ago

            It does if you forgot everything you learned in school

              • glibg10b
                link
                fedilink
                English
                11 year ago

                And I agree. You’re completely missing my point, though

                The only advice I can give is to re-read the thread, starting from @[email protected]’s comment. If the source of your confusion is that you don’t know what escaping the asterisks means, then just ask

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      31 year ago

      Of course, there’s also the times where we just make the research hard to do.

      Like, we teach kids PEMDAS, but then don’t actually follow PEMDAS in the original textbooks that introduce it and definitely not in common math or physics texts.

      Like, you’ll see 1/2√r in Feynman’s lectures being written not to represent ½√r = √r / 2 as pemdas would suggest, but 1/(2√r).

      Similarly, the original textbooks that introduced PEMDAS, if you read them, actually followed what you might call PEJMDAS, where multiplication via juxtaposition is treated as binding tighter than explicit multiplication, so 1÷2(2+3) would be interpreted not as ½(5) but as 1 ÷ (2 * 5), but they considered that so obvious they didn’t bother to explicitly spell it out in the rules.

      And now we have Facebook memes and tiktok livestreams arguing about what 1÷2(2+3) actually means.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        21 year ago

        Also by the time you’ve learned order of operations, you’ve outgrown the ÷ operator. You would never write 1 ÷ (2 * 5), you would write it with a proper numerator and denominator like anyone outside of elementary school would.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          21 year ago

          I hate these math problems you see on social media. No one would write that way or code that way. It is ambiguous, and even if it weren’t it is still hard to figure out. I think in my entire career I have seen one single line of code that took PEMDAS to sort out, I remember that line and the programmer told me that they were exploiting a feature of the complier to get slightly faster results. He was an annoying person