I wrote a (very long) blog post about those viral math problems and am looking for feedback, especially from people who are not convinced that the problem is ambiguous.
It’s about a 30min read so thank you in advance if you really take the time to read it, but I think it’s worth it if you joined such discussions in the past, but I’m probably biased because I wrote it :)
I read the whole article. I don’t agree with the notation of the American Physical Society, but who am I to argue that? 😄
I started out thinking I knew how the order of operations worked and ended up with a broader view of the subject. Thank you for opening my mind a bit today. I will be more explicit in my notations from now on.
Thank you so much for taking the time. I’m also not convinced that APS’s notation is a very good choice but I’m neither american nor a physisist 🤣
I’d love to see how the exceptions work that the APS added, like allowing explicit multiplications on line-breaks, if they still would do the multiplication first, but I couldn’t find a single instance where somebody following the APS notation had line-break inside an expression.
I clicked on the link to see what you were talking about, and the quotes which are used in the blog aren’t in there at all. i.e. I searched the whole document, not just the referenced page, and, for example, the expression “multiplication before division” isn’t in there at all. On the other hand the stuff about not inserting multiplication signs into terms is 100% correct, because you are breaking up one term into two, and dropping the precedence from Terms to Multiplication, which changes the answer.
Direct quote from the article:
Yep, that’s the “quote” in the blog, but if you click on the link not only is it not on page 21, it’s not in there at all. i.e. the quote - if it even is a quote - is out of context.