Comment on A fake Facebook event disguised as a math problem has been one of its top posts for 6 months

• barsoap@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Nothing. And that’s why people don’t write equations like that: You either see

       4
  6 + ---
       2
  

  or

   6 + 4
  -------
     2
  

  If you wrote 6 + 4 / 2 in a paper you’d get reviewers complaining that it’s ambiguous, if you want it to be on one line write (6+4) / 2 or 6 + (4/2) or 6 + ⁴⁄₂ or even 0.5 (6 + 2) Working mathematicians never came up with PEMDAS, which disambiguates it without parenthesis, US teachers did. Noone else does it that way because it does not, in the slightest, aid readability.

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