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 :)
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.