I wrote a (very long) blog post about those viral math problems and am looking for feedback, especially from people who are not convinced that the problem is ambiguous.
It’s about a 30min read so thank you in advance if you really take the time to read it, but I think it’s worth it if you joined such discussions in the past, but I’m probably biased because I wrote it :)
It seems Americans are taught pemdas and not bodas.
I Looked up doing factorials and n! = n(n – 1) is used interchangeably with n! = n*(n – 1)
So Americans will multiply anything first. This is why I put 6 ÷ ( n*(n – 1)) in excel to avoid confusion.
yeah, the way I have been taught is that either you put the multiplication sign there or not, it’s the exact same, there’s absolutely no difference in n(n-1) and n*(n-1). in the end, you treat it like the * sign is there and it’s just matter of convenience you can leave it off.
Americans use PEMDAS, in the UK we use BODMAS, and I assume other English speaking countries use one or the other, but there is no difference between them in terms of order of operations, because it’s:
brackets (parenthesis)
orders (exponentials)
division & multiplication (multiplication & division), performed left to right
addition & subtraction, performed left to right
People who choose to divide or multiply first because of the acronym have just forgotten that they go together left to right.
“Next, we perform operations on multiplication or division from left to right.” Found that in like 20 sources. Funny how I didn’t see any of that yesterday.
This is crazy swear never heard that rule.
100% sure I solved everything in class following the acronym. Glad we sorted this out before I helped any kids do Homework.