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 :)
It seems Americans are taught pemdas and not bodas.
I Looked up doing factorials and n! = n(n – 1) is used interchangeably with n! = n*(n – 1)
So Americans will multiply anything first. This is why I put 6 ÷ ( n*(n – 1)) in excel to avoid confusion.
yeah, the way I have been taught is that either you put the multiplication sign there or not, it’s the exact same, there’s absolutely no difference in n(n-1) and n*(n-1). in the end, you treat it like the * sign is there and it’s just matter of convenience you can leave it off.
Americans use PEMDAS, in the UK we use BODMAS, and I assume other English speaking countries use one or the other, but there is no difference between them in terms of order of operations, because it’s:
brackets (parenthesis)
orders (exponentials)
division & multiplication (multiplication & division), performed left to right
addition & subtraction, performed left to right
People who choose to divide or multiply first because of the acronym have just forgotten that they go together left to right.