• Ender of Games@sh.itjust.works
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      8 months ago

      Even your “BODMAS” isn’t universal, lots of people learn “PEMDAS” or “BEDMAS”

      At any level of mathematics after elementary school, you never see terrible expressions like this. Well, except for facebook and twitter

      Take for example: 2/2*2 It is 0.5 or 2 depending on order. But if I were anything after high school (I was more complacent in high school, I guess) if someone gave me an arbitrarily solved equation or expression like this, I would be livid and raise hell at them for trying to do that.

        • Ender of Games@sh.itjust.works
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          8 months ago

          Yes, the fundamentals the same, higher orders come first. BUT

          -Multiplication comes before division in some forms, like PEMDAS. In the example I use, this changes the answer.

          -When you apply an operation, you should specify what it is operating on. In all of these acronyms, addition comes before subtraction, but with a different example:

          2 - 2 + 2

          The minus sign only applies to the middle term, by convention. It is the equivalent of “adding negative two”. You can quickly see that this expression is equal to 2.

          But if you use one of these acronyms, you end with this expression evaluating to -2. I would say it is almost universally accepted that 2 is the correct answer, and -2 is incorrect. Basically, all these acronyms end up being useless waste of time.

          I don’t know if I conveyed this the first time, but, as a lover of pure mathematics, this is something that does not have application in life or in study. It’s an utterly useless waste of time. There is never a case where someone give you numbers like this, where it is not clear what order the numbers should be applied in.

    • Leviathan@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      It’s perfectly reasonable to read this as both (40-32)/2 and 40-(32/2) anywhere past basic math.