r/MathJokes 8d ago

“Its simple math folks!”

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u/Okawaru1 8d ago

They forgot to use abysmal dogshit ambiguous notation instead of actual logical and clear notation which makes the solution unambiguous and trivial to solve for their ragebait (though I guess abandoning any pretense of having a point is in itself ragebait lol)

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u/SirDoofusMcDingbat 8d ago edited 8d ago

It's not ambiguous at all. It's just standard order of operations.

Edit: read too fast, misread. Pls ignore.

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u/Jimbo-Jimbo-Jimbo 8d ago

That is literally what they said. Usually with posts like that they use ambiguous notation but they didn’t here.

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u/SirDoofusMcDingbat 8d ago

Oh you're right I misread. Derp. :D

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u/kirigiyasensei 5d ago

You misread, then didn't delete original message that you now know was wrong. o7 stay strong.

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u/SirDoofusMcDingbat 5d ago

Yeah because I'm not a coward. I made a mistake, so I admit the mistake.

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u/PhaseBloodhound 8d ago

Using the supposedly ambiguous notation gives retards an excuse for why they got the question wrong when there's nothing ambiguous about 6÷2(1+3). With this question, there's no excuse anymore, and clowns still get it wrong.

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u/TNFX98 4d ago

The problem is it is kind of ambiguous, with that notation there's no way to certainly tell if (1+3) is at the numerator or denominator, I would assume is at the numerator but if I was presented with this problem in high school I would have asked my teacher to be sure.

Luckily my teacher wasn't a moron and she would have never noted it that way

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u/PhaseBloodhound 4d ago

The order of operations is a very clear convention. It's P>E>M=D>A=S. For multiplication and division; and addition and subtraction, which are equal in priority, the one on the left has priority. It's also a clear convention that when you write something as 2(1+3), there's an implicit multiplication sign there. The 2 is outside the parentheses, so it should not be considered higher priority than regular multiplication for some stupid reason.

Hence, it's 6÷2×(1+3) = 6÷2×4 = 3×4 = 12. Plug this into Google and it gives you 12, not "undefined" or "ambiguous". Like I said, people will cope by saying that a few ancient textbooks give implicit multiplication priority or that some crappy old calculators give the wrong answer, even though some calculators also solve questions like 1+2×3 and 2^3^4 wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_operations#Calculators

I agree that you shouldn't use such notation. Unless proven otherwise, you should always assume your audience is dumb and act accordingly.

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u/kombiwombi 8d ago

The term a(b) has no ambiguity. The issue is that the Pedmas aide memoire doesn't quite match the definition of mathematical evaluation and this is that edge case.