Submitted 2 weeks ago by LadyButterfly@piefed.blahaj.zone to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://piefed.cdn.blahaj.zone/posts/Ao/vN/AovNhRmmeHwHDFK.jpg
Presuming PEMDAS is our order of operations and the 5 next to the parentheses indicates multiplication…
2+5(8-5) -> 2+5(3) -> 2+15=17
Other than adding a multiplication indicator next to parentheses for clarification (I believe it’s * for programming and text chat purposes, a miniature “x” or dot for pen and paper/traditional calculators), this seems fine, yeah.
…I worry about how many people may not understand solving equations like these.
That’s not even an equation, just basic algebra
Technically not algebra, right? Algebra is where you move things around and solve for variables, and that kind of thing. This is just arithmetic.
Fair enough, I’ve heard “math problem” and “math equation” used interchangeably.
Also you would be surprised how many people do not know basic algebra, at least in the US rofl
Algebra has horrible syntax. Way too much implications.
While I never failed a math class, I also never went last high school. When would your presumptions NOT be true?
Some forms of programming syntax, although there are the fringe cases where an equation is represented by a symbol in conjunction with a parentheses input.
For example:
y(x) = 2x+3
5+y(1) = 10, as 1 is substituted in for x in the prior equation.
Multiplication sign is not required in situations like this. Same with unknowns - you don’t have to write 2*x, you just write 2x.
I prefer BM-DAS, no one’s out here doing exponents, and no one calls brackets “parentheses”…
The way I was taught growing up, brackets are [these]. Parenthesis are (these).
Yes, technically the latter are also brackets. But they can also be called parenthesis, whereas the former is exclusively a bracket. So we were taught to call them separate words to differentiate while doing equations.
I learnt it as BODMAS (brackets, orders, division and multiplication, addition and subtraction).
Pemdas, parenthesis first, for a total of 3. Then multiplication, 15, then addition. 17. What’s hard about this?
What’s hard about it is people are fucking stupid.
No, it’s written poorly to drive engagement. People read left to right and try to do math that way too, but if you want to be mean to people who don’t remember things they learned in elementary school then never applied in real life you write it like this.
(8-5)5-2
Far easier for most people, but then you don’t get the arguments…
you go the other direction below the equator
Legit gave me pause for like half a second. Damnit lol
Isn’t the southern hemisphere above the equator if you live there
I fucking suck at math and totally just re-proved it to myself with this problem lmao.
It didn’t make sense to me to multiply the 3 & the 5 with zero consideration for the “2”. I have ALWAYS struggled with the steps to solve these types of equations.
So the answer I got was 21. Some of us are just bad with numbers, I s’pose.
The numbers in the equation and their totals are completely irrelevant to the order you perform the operations.
I don’t think it’s an issue of “being bad with numbers”, I think the issue is not understanding the logic or being able to understand the bottom up type of thinking or something.
This is absolutely not a problem of being bad with numbers. That’s like if I had trouble reading a Chinese sentence about gardening and said I’m just bad with plants. My issue is that I’m not familiar with the notation used to explain the concept - not a problem with the concept itself that the notation merely arbitrarily symbolizes.
Being good or bad at math is not really an inherent thing, aside from some geniuses and some people with disabilities. If you want to be good at math, you can be!
If you don’t remember pemdas, you can use the longer P.lease E.xcuse M.y D.ear A.unt S.ally.
Its order of operations, to get rid of brackets do the internal, then the 5 tells you there was 5 sets of the amount in brackets. Rather than 2+5 first.
That’s the answer I arrived at as well, don’t feel so bad. I’m more of a writer than a calculator, though.
Some other parent’s thesis.
Cruel Parent’s Thesis?
5 isn’t a valid function name, is obviously the right answer.
How can you be sure it’s not defined when we only see one line?
They didn’t say it’s not defined, they said it’s not a valid name. Most languages don’t allow function names to start with a number, so 5 literally cannot be a function if that’s the case…
But that’s assuming this isn’t some really obscure language.
It could be a Church Numeral in which case function application is the same as addition and the answer is actually 10…
Depends on the language.
I’m pretty sure that’s a module operator…
I’m sorry but isn’t this elementary school math?
It became a meme a few years ago, people would post problems like this and argue about whose was right, as if there were no objective truth. It hurt to watch.
Arguably, there is no objective truth, since the symbols and rules of mathematics are assigned arbitrarily, and are basically a social contract, just like language!
…Wait, that means there’s no objective meaning of “objective”, crap
ya this one is super unambiguously PEMDAS, the one that has more of an argument is the one with the division of whether a/bc is a / (b * c) or (a / b) * c
In the rest of the world: yes.
In the US: I highly doubt it.
This is just basic math, if you can’t figure this out you’re probably 8 years old.
Probably some backwards-ass red state / red town shenanigans.
Math was always taught in my Blue cities. The atrocities of the US’s history was never left out of the curriculum.
We need to actually finish doing reconstruction and fix this country.
I think that ordering of calculation was taught around 5th grade back in my day (11yo)
Definitely taught in parts of the US, it’s a regional thing though
In most of the world? Yes.
We didn’t learn elements until high school tbf
I got some people really angry at me when I suggested writing some math expression with parenthesis so it would be clearer. I think someone told me that order of operations is like a natural law and not a convention, and thus everyone should know it or be able to figure it out.
I sometimes like to add unnecessary parentheses or brackets to section things off and improve legibility, but I don’t do any math stuff collaboratively, so I have no idea whether others would find that disruptive or helpful.
I do this, sometimes it helps reveal a natural pattern when some parts of earlier terms have “disappeared” to simplification
I mean, there are very few ambiguous cases when you know how the order of operations works.
Using parenthesis can really help if you want to simplify a term or need to rewrite something. I do that all the time because a lot of times you then can just cross stuff out fast on equations or get a common term that just has some factor instead of having a convolutet equation.
I got really angry because the prettier code formatter insists on removing parentheses, making things less clear. Because it’s an “opinionated” formatter you can’t tell it not to do that without using ugly hacks.
Sure, logically there are times when you don’t need them. But, often it helps to explain what’s happening in the code when you can use parentheses to group certain things. It helps in particular when you want to use “&&” and “||” to say “do X only if Y fails”.
I think you can do // prettier-ignore, because I remember facing that exact situation.
2 5 8 5 - × + for you RPN fans =)
Actually:
2 <enter> 5 <enter> 8 <enter> 5 - x +
10 keystrokes
I use RPN on my phone calculator for fun but it can also be annoying sometimes.
On my CASIO FX-260 Solar II calculator (super cheap, really nice and simple but also powerful) that would be:
2 + 5 ( 8 - 5 ) =
9 keystrokes
You could do
8 <enter> 5 - 5 × 2 +
-> 8 keystrokes
Im terrible at math, what is this though?
Any PEMDAS enjoyers in chat?
I assume p is for “parentheses”, because where I grew up it was BEDMAS, for brackets.
Let’s not do engagement bait here 😭
I don’t know how we’ve managed to get to 2025 and there’s still apparently people who haven’t seen a thousand shit PEMDAS posts already
PEMDAS bitches.
It’s interesting that you can somewhat tell where you are from based on this, I learned it as BODMAS
I never ran into PEMDAS while growing up, in Sweden I’ve always been taught of it as the following order of operations:
(* (+ 2 5) (+ 2 5))
Hope some LISP can clear this up
Precedences are just made up social constructs, don’t let the system restrict you, you can evaluate this expression however you want. Go wild.
I’m not seeing a single mention of My Dear Aunt Sally. The youth are lost…
Hrmm.
I read that as resulting in 21.
My education system did fail me.
I plugged that into ghci as 5+2*(8-5), and it says 17.
:(
I did (5+2)*(8-5).
Doh.
To all the people yelling PEMDAS and BOMBDAS or whatever - languages other than English exist.
2+5(8-5)
For anyone wanting to see a different way of solving it with distribution:
2+58-55 2+40-25 42-25 17
So long as you follow the basic math rules, you can solve it in many different ways to get the same result.
This is an antimeme
My education system didn’t fail me, I failed it.
The high-and-mightiness quotient in this thread is reaching critical levels
Let’s keep it easy. There’s 2 + all the other number who results in 15 = 17.
Someone may mistake by doing 2+5 then the rest of the operation, resulting in 21.
Gonna keep shouting until it sticks;
Put a goddamn function sign for the parenthesis. Don’t assume everyone just knows what to do with the parenthesis alone. Fml it bugs me every time this meme gets posted.
Obviously the answer is 2+x(y)
Or it simply could be that I haven’t needed to concern myself with the order of operations more than a dozen times since high school. Even when working as a web coder it was so seldom necessary that I can’t recall a single example.
The US education system was still pretty decent when I was in middle and high school in the 1980s, so we definitely covered this in algebra.
Was anyone else ever taught it as BOMDAS as opposed to BODMAS?
Syntax error
My dumbahh did 2+5 like it was in parentheses and got 21
The education system did not fail me. I failed my education.
I don’t get why these kind of post crop up so often.
The answer to them doesn’t matter and these aren’t really math questions, because there is no context given. This is just endless discussions about different people having different assumptions on notation used there…
In real math, where the numbers mean something, good and consistent notation is important, but not necessary, because the order of operations or what those operations are exactly would be clear through the context of these formulas. Good notation just makes it easier to spot errors, work with formulas or to avoid confusion.
Here is what I would assume this formula could mean. Someone has 2 apples and 5 bags of apples that initially came with 8 apples each inside, but someone else ate 5 apples from each of these bags.
With this context it is pretty clear what the answer would be.
That’s so evil and subtle. It took me multiple attempts to figure it out. You have to have quite the sharp eye to realize: no, you do not stop at calculating the numbers in parantesis first. You don’t add the resulting numbers, there is no +/- operator, so the number in parantesis is the power of the number before it. But wait! if You calculated 2+5 = 7 * 3 and hot 21, you are wrong. Remember that multiplication goes first, so it’s: 2+5(8-5) = 2+5*3=2+15=17
SSUPII@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
I feel like I am getting trolled
Isn’t 17 the actual right answer?
NewDark@lemmings.world 2 weeks ago
Exactly
sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
So it’s just an unfunny meme?
marcos@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Some people insist there’s no “correct” order for the basic arithmetic operations. And worse, some people insist the correct order is parenthesis first, then left to right.
Both of those sets of people are wrong.
MotoAsh@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
Hopefully you can see where their confusion might come from, though. PEMDAS is more P-E-MD-AS. If you have a bunch of unparenthesized addition and subtraction, left to right is correct. A lot of like, firstgrader math problems are just basic problems that are usually left to right (but should have some extras to highlight PEMDAS somewhere I’d hope).
So they’re mostly telling you they only remember as much math as a small child that flunked.
SkyeStarfall@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
I mean, arithmetic order is just convention, not a mathematical truth. But that convention works in the way we know, yes, because that’s what’s… well… convention
Petter1@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
Well, this is just a writing standard that is globally agreed on,
The writing rules are defined by humans not by natural force
(That one thing and another thing are two things, is a rule from nature, as comparison)
pixeltree@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
SSUPII@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Yeah I know that. But I was feeling confused as to why it was here. That’s why I was feeling trolled, because it made me doubt basic math for being posted in a memes community.
RizzRustbolt@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
There is no answer. Because there is no question.
imetators@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
That is a problem, tho