this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
857 points (96.4% liked)

Memes

45889 readers
2299 users here now

Rules:

  1. Be civil and nice.
  2. Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
857
6÷2(1+2) (programming.dev)
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 :)

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

My years out of school has made me forget about how division notation is actually supposed to work and how genuinely useless the ÷ and / symbols are outside the most basic two-number problems. And it's entirely me being dumb because I've already written problems as 6÷(2(1+2)) to account for it before. Me brain dun work right ;~;

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

There's no forms consensus on which one is correct. To avoid misunderstanding mathematicians use a horizontal bar.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

The one that is least ambiguous is objectively more correcter.

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

Only if it's a fraction. If it's 2 separate terms then you use whatever your country uses for division - obelus or colon or whatever. They have to be 2 separate things, otherwise how would you write to divide by a fraction?