this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

https://zeta.one/viral-math/

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 :)

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's actually "both". There are two conventions. One is a bit more popular in science and engineering and the other one in the general population. It's actually even more complicated than that (thus the long blog post) but the most correct answer would be to point out that the implicit multiplication after the division is ambiguous. So it's not really "solvable" in that form without context.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

You’d think we would’ve solve this with Einstein or Aristotle or something.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's not a math problem, it's a communication problem. The person who wrote it down didn't make themselves clear

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

It's totally clear. It's a number divided by a factorised term, as per The Distributive Law and Terms.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago

Indeed it was already solved more than 100 years ago. The issue isn't that it's "ambiguous" - it isn't - it's that people have forgotten what they were taught (students don't get this wrong - only adults). i.e. The Distributive Law and Terms.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

As if, people still can't agree if zero is a natural number either