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[–] 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (52 children)

They did the joke wrong. To do it right you need to use the ÷ symbol. Because people never use that after they learn fractions, people treat things like a + b ÷ c + d as

a + b
-----
c + d

Or (a + b) ÷ (c + d) when they should be treating it as a + (b ÷ c) + d.

That's the most common one of these "troll math" tricks. Because notating as

a + b + d
    -
    c

Is much more common and useful. So people get used to grouping everything around the division operator as if they're in parentheses.

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago* (30 children)

    Or
    12 / 2(6)
    And trying to argue this is 36.

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  • [–] 8 points 11 months ago* (20 children)

    Now that's a good troll math thing because it gets really deep into the weeds of mathematical notation. There isn't one true order of operations that is objectively correct, and on top of that, that's hardly the way most people would write that. As in, if you wrote that by hand, you wouldn't use the / symbol. You'd either use ÷ or a proper fraction.

    It's a good candidate for nerd sniping.

    Personally, I'd call that 36 as written given the context you're saying it in, instead of calling it 1. But I'd say it's ambiguous and you should notate in a way to avoid ambiguities. Especially if you're in the camp of multiplication like a(b) being different from ab and/or a × b.

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  • [–] 5 points 11 months ago

    Well, now you might be running into syntax issues instead of PEMDAS issues depending on what they're confused about. If it's 12 over 2*6, it's 1. If it's 12 ÷ 2 x 6, it's 36.

    A lot of people try a bunch of funky stuff to represent fractions in text form (like mixing spaces and no spaces) when they should just be treating it like a programmer has to, and use parenthesis if it's a complex fraction in basic text form.

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  • [–] 1 point 11 months ago (2 children)

    Treat a + b/c + d as a + b/(c + d) I can almost understand, I was guilty of doing that in school with multiplication, but auto-parenthesising the first part is really crazy take, imo

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  • [–] 0 points 10 months ago (17 children)

    Because people never use that after they learn fractions,

    Yes they do, because not every division is a fraction

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (16 children)
  • [–] -2 points 10 months ago (15 children)

    https://math.berkeley.edu/~wu/order5.pdf

    I already said he was wrong about that. Quoting him saying it doesn't change that he's wrong about it

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (14 children)

    Take it up with Berkeley then.

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  • [–] -2 points 10 months ago (13 children)

    Take it up with Berkeley then

    What for? You're only the second person ever to have quoted him. You're not the first person to refuse to look in Maths textbooks though 🙄

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (12 children)
  • [–] -2 points 10 months ago (11 children)

    Take it up with Berkeley

    Says person refusing to look in Maths textbooks 😂

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (10 children)

    I cannot stress this enough. If you have a problem with that, contact the author or Berkeley, not me.

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  • [–] -2 points 10 months ago (9 children)

    I cannot stress this enough. If you have a problem with that, contact the author or Berkeley, not me

    I cannot stress this enough - look in Maths textbooks, not random University blogs 😂

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (8 children)
  • [–] -2 points 10 months ago (7 children)

    Tell them, not me

    You're the one commenting without reading Maths textbooks

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (6 children)
  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (4 children)

    You can stop humoring this broken robot. Especially when the context is 'yeah I already said this textbook is wrong, but I am better than you because you need to read this textbook.'

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    They seem to believe that and on the 8th day God made the one true objective order of operations that all humans use and agree on.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago* (2 children)

    Except for that time the definition of division changed 130 years ago. Which is not a rule! It's notation, or syntax, or possibly sometimes a rule. Whichever one lets them sneer hardest.

    I tried explaining RPN to them a year ago. They still insist there's parentheses in it. Today they called it an "app."

    Dogmatic patience vampire is still trying to bait me into further wasted effort.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Wowww. Insisting that they're good at math. I distinctly remember learning that RPN doesn't need parentheses in college.

    reverse Polish calculators do not need expressions to be parenthesized

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Polish_notation

    But, you know, anyone can edit Wikipedia. Someone probably put that there who hasn't opened a math textbook.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago

    Oh of course. The sky isn't blue unless that's written in a maths textbook.

    And if you look up and see stars, it's still blue, because it's written in a maths textbook! Are you saying a teacher could be wrong?!, smug emoji, crying emoji, roll-eyes emoji?

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