Perfide, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

You lost me on the section when you started going into different calculators, but I read the rest of the post. Well written even if I ultimately disagree!

The reason imo there is ambiguity with these math problems is bad/outdated teaching. The way I was taught pemdas, you always do the left-most operations first, while otherwise still following the ordering.

Doing this for 6÷2(1+2), there is no ambiguity that the answer is 9. You do your parentheses first as always, 6÷2(3), and then since division and multiplication are equal in ordering weight, you do the division first because it’s the left most operation, leaving us 3(3), which is of course 9.

If someone wrote this equation with the intention that the answer is 1, they wrote the equation wrong, simple as that.