• Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      BEDMAS: Bracket - Exponent - Divide - Multiply - Add - Subtract

      PEMDAS: Parenthesis - Exponent - Multiply - Divide - Add - Subtract

      Firstly, don’t forget exponents come before multiply/divide. More importantly, neither defines wether implied multiplication is a multiply/divide operation or a bracketed operation.

        • Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca
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          1 year ago

          Exponents are second, parentheses/brackets are always first. What order you do your exponents in is another ambiguity though.

            • Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca
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              9 months ago

              234 is ambiguous. 2(34) is standard practice, but some calculators aren’t that smart and will do (23)4.

              It’s ambiguous because it works both ways, not because we don’t have a standard. Confusion is possible.

              • The only confusion I can see is if you intended for the 4 to be an exponent of the 3 and didn’t know how to do that inline, or if you did actually intend for the 4 to be a separate numeral in the same term? And I’m confused because you haven’t used inline notation in a place that doesn’t support exponents of exponents without using inline notation (or a screenshot of it).

                As written, which inline would be written as (2^3)4, then it’s 32. If you intended for the 4 to be an exponent, which would be written inline as 2^3^4, then it’s 2^81 (which is equal to whatever that is equal to - my calculator batteries are nearly dead).

                we don’t have a standard

                We do have a standard, and I told you what it was. The only confusion here is whether you didn’t know how to write that inline or not.

                • Tlaloc_Temporal@lemmy.ca
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                  9 months ago

                  It’s ambiguous because it works both ways, not because we don’t have a standard.

                  Try reading the whole sentence. There is a standard, I’m not claiming there isn’t. Confusion exists because operating against the standard doesn’t immediately break everything like ignoring brackets would.

                  Just to make sure we’re on the same page (because different clients render text differently, more ambiguous standards…), what does this text say?

                  234

                  It should say 2^3^4; “Two to the power of three to the power of four”. The proper answer is 2⁸¹, but many math interpreters (including Excel, MATLAB, and many students) will instead compute 8⁴, which is quite different.

                  We have a standard because it’s ambiguous. If there was only one way to do it, we’d just do that, no standard needed. You’d need to go pretty deep into kettle math or group theory to find atypical addition for example.

      • Pipoca@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        It’s BE(D=M)(A=S). Different places have slightly different acronyms - B for bracket vs P for parenthesis, for example.

        But multiplication and division are whichever comes first right to left in the expression, and likewise with subtraction.

        Although implicit multiplication is often treated as binding tighter than explicit. 1/2x is usually interpreted as 1/(2x), not (1/2)x.

        • CheesyFox@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          a fair point, but aren’t division and subtraction are non-communicative, hence both operands need to be evaluated first?

        • unoriginalsin@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          It’s BE(D=M)(A=S). Different places have slightly different acronyms - B for bracket vs P for parenthesis, for example.

          But, since your rule has the D&M as well as the A&S in brackets does that mean your rule means you have to do D&M as well as the A&S in the formula before you do the exponents that are not in brackets?

          But seriously. Only grade school arithmetic textbooks have formulas written in this ambiguous manner. Real mathematicians write their formulas clearly so that there isn’t any ambiguity.

          • Pipoca@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            That’s not really true.

            You’ll regularly see textbooks where 3x/2y is written to mean 3x/(2y) rather than (3x/2)*y because they don’t want to format

            3x
            ----
            2y
            

            properly because that’s a terrible waste of space in many contexts.

                  • Pipoca@lemmy.world
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                    1 year ago

                    Grade school is a US synonym for primary or elementary school; it doesn’t seem to be used as a term in England or Australia. Apparently, they’re often K-6 or K-8; my elementary school was K-4; some places have a middle school or junior high between grade school and high school.

      • And009@reddthat.com
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        1 year ago

        Multiplication VS division doesn’t matter just like order of addition and subtraction doesn’t matter… You can do either and get same results.

        Edit : the order matters as proven below. So the order is important

      • Squirrel@thelemmy.club
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        1 year ago

        I was taught that division is just inverse multiplication, and to be treated as such when it came to the order of operations (i.e. they are treated as the same type of operation). Ditto with addition and subtraction.