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 agoNothing. 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.