the math apocalypse: 48÷2(9+3) = ?

[Mr Queeba]

I just did this in school today.
Remember PEMDAS.

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[PowerDag]

we are tearing eachother apart over a purposefully ambiguous question

[BluetoothBoy]

we are tearing eachother apart over a purposefully ambiguous question

Gotta love these forums.

[Stocking]

uhh order of operations???

48÷2(9+3)

48÷2(12)

24(12)

288

there is only one right answer, anyone who said anything else is wrong.

[McJobless]

we are tearing eachother apart over a purposefully ambiguous question

Good thing it's not ambiguous then; people are just have problems reading.

[otto-san]

i really don't think 2(9+3) is a single term

if it were x(9+3) ya mabe, if it were 2x(9+3) ya mabe, but it aint

[Jubel]

Good thing it's not ambiguous then; people are just have problems reading.

I think it extends way past that and into the teachers.
Some people learnt this way, and that really isnt their own fault.

its the crap teachers who taught them.

[$trinick]

Good thing it's not ambiguous then; people are just have problems reading.

Holy stuff you people are so dense. I literally quoted a god damn berkeley professor who explains why the question is ambiguous.

I'm sorry, you guys aren't math professors. Your word does not defeat the word of theirs. Unless you can find me an equally or more highly qualified person to publish an article on how the typed division sign ( / ) is not ambiguous as to how many terms it includes, you're flat out wrong. And you are wrong, because you'll never find a rule that the slash operator literally only includes the next item.

[McJobless]

I made a program to demonstrate:



I disagree with the Berkeley Professor's explanation. Somebody might get confused, but following the basic rules we've set out for maths questions I believe it becomes quite obviously 288. Left-to-Right and PEDMAS (with Division/Multiplication and Addiction/Subtraction as the same priorities) or whatever you call it. You can't just ignore one for the other, they both need to work together.

[Blockzillahead]

we passed 288 replies!!! the answer is 288 god told me

[$trinick]

The computer can solve it because it forces itself to interpret the ambiguous question in an unambiguous way.

Left-To-Right is not an actual rule. It's something that you may have been taught (I was never taught it) but it's not an actual rule of math. I apologize that your experience with maths is incongruent with logic. If Left-To-Right was a rule, then the question would be unambiguous. But it isn't, and you're wrong to say it is.

I don't know how to say it nicely anymore. Anyone who thinks the question isn't ambiguous is wrong, and you should feel bad about it because multiple people have spent a long time trying to hammer it into your skull.

[ßlöükfáce]

i know how to get the answer
do meth and u will find out

[McJobless]

The computer can solve it because it forces itself to interpret the ambiguous question in an unambiguous way.

Left-To-Right is not an actual rule. It's something that you may have been taught (I was never taught it) but it's not an actual rule of math. I apologize that your experience with maths is incongruent with logic. If Left-To-Right was a rule, then the question would be unambiguous. But it isn't, and you're wrong to say it is.

I don't know how to say it nicely anymore. Anyone who thinks the question isn't ambiguous is wrong, and you should feel bad about it because multiple people have spent a long time trying to hammer it into your skull.

It seems a bit silly then that students from multiple schools I know of all agreed with me that Left-to-Right is a rule. It's the fact we're an English speaking community, and therefore we interpret our maths questions in the same way as we do our reading paragraphs. It would be ridiculous to be inconsistent. Why would I change up, going Right-to-Left then Left-to-Right and always change based on what mood I'm in? I just don't think that makes sense. Your eyes are accustomed to scanning words and numbers from Left-to-Right, so every pass you do of an equation should be done Left-to-Right.

I'm not going to feel bad because I still feel justified in saying the answer is 288.

[Georges]

We passed 288 replies.

[$trinick]

English is a syntactical construct created by human beings and has absolutely no bearing on how mathematics work. They're 100% irrelevant. Japanese people read from top-to-bottom, so does that mean you have to solve the numerators of fractions before solving the denominator? Arabic is read right-to-left, does that mean that in English speaking countries the answer is 288 yet in Arabic speaking countries the answer is 2?

I am truly sorry that you were taught something that isn't true. The fact of the matter, though, is that you straight up are not qualified to make the decision on how math problems should be solved. In fact, nobody is. That's the glorious thing about math: it itself is inherently unambiguous. The issue is with our representation of the question without parenthesis or using a fraction bar. Nobody has decided that / can only pertain to the terms immediately to the left and right of it.

Let me say this one more time, loud and clear:

You are not qualified to challenge a math professors view. Your opinion on the answer does not matter.