No mathematician would write an ambiguous equation like that.
People who argued over these are displaying an incorrect memory of a math education that is simply not a good look.
Division and multiplication have the same precedence, equations are evaluated left to right, so equation is divide then multiple. Division and subtraction are syntactic sugar for multiplication and addition.
These are fun little experiments showing how social media makes people more stupider and how proud the ignorant behave amongst themselves.
Division and subtraction are syntactic sugar for multiplication and addition.
Can you tell me a bit more about how you mean this? I searched a bit but only basic primary school level resources about the relationship between addition and subtraction came up.
Do you mean like subtraction is just adding a negative number, and division is just multiplication by the inverse of a number? In that case I don’t really see how it simplifies things much because negatives and inverses still need as much definition.
Or are you talking about bit-wise operations like a computer would use to do these things?
It also pulls double duty by making math look hard, ambiguous, and untrustworthy. Anti education, poor reasoning skills, and an implicit distrust of mathematical models and statistics.
It’s not unheard of to find, in an exercise, “Simplify 4x²/2x”. The answer is almost guaranteed to be 2x. (There are some interesting exceptions, but they’re not really important). More often such a question would use fraction notation, but not always, to prevent exercises taking up too much space.
What’s going on is that the multiplication of the 2 and x, because they are written without a symbol in between, is seen as morally being something you should do first.
And in such exercise contexts, it’s unlikely to be misunderstood. But it’d still be better to be clear about it.
No mathematician would write an ambiguous equation like that.
People who argued over these are displaying an incorrect memory of a math education that is simply not a good look.
Division and multiplication have the same precedence, equations are evaluated left to right, so equation is divide then multiple. Division and subtraction are syntactic sugar for multiplication and addition.
These are fun little experiments showing how social media makes people more stupider and how proud the ignorant behave amongst themselves.
Can you tell me a bit more about how you mean this? I searched a bit but only basic primary school level resources about the relationship between addition and subtraction came up.
Do you mean like subtraction is just adding a negative number, and division is just multiplication by the inverse of a number? In that case I don’t really see how it simplifies things much because negatives and inverses still need as much definition. Or are you talking about bit-wise operations like a computer would use to do these things?
It also pulls double duty by making math look hard, ambiguous, and untrustworthy. Anti education, poor reasoning skills, and an implicit distrust of mathematical models and statistics.
It’s not unheard of to find, in an exercise, “Simplify 4x²/2x”. The answer is almost guaranteed to be 2x. (There are some interesting exceptions, but they’re not really important). More often such a question would use fraction notation, but not always, to prevent exercises taking up too much space.
What’s going on is that the multiplication of the 2 and x, because they are written without a symbol in between, is seen as morally being something you should do first.
And in such exercise contexts, it’s unlikely to be misunderstood. But it’d still be better to be clear about it.