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1. clacke: inhibited exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛 (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Sunday, 07-Apr-2024 08:28:07 EDT clacke: inhibited exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛

   Every year for the last 13 years, some post makes the rounds complaining that calculators disagree on what an expression like 8/2(2+2) or 6÷2(1+2) means.

   And every time some loud people show up saying people are idiots if they don't know there's One Correct Answer, and if you know Math you know the Answer.

   Here's science educator "The How and Why of Mathematics" with full receipts from papers around 1917 and full receipts from maths and physics publishing guidelines of today explaining that it's Just Not That Clear.

   It seems the people who think it is are mostly people who went to US primary school and highschool and learned the PEMDAS initialism in the 1990s or later.

   She even goes through various calculator brands and what their representatives have said! Basically only Sharp calculators are consistent within their product lines, others have moved back and forth over time.

   farside.link/invidious/watch?v…
   youtube.com/watch?v=4x-BcYCiKC…

   If you don't like videos, Berkeley professor George Bergman has written something similar back in 2013 or so:

   math.berkeley.edu/~gbergman/mi…
   The Problem with PEMDAS: Why Calculators Disagree https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x-BcYCiKCk&t=3

   1. clacke: inhibited exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛 (clacke@libranet.de)'s status on Sunday, 07-Apr-2024 08:32:34 EDT clacke: inhibited exhausted pixie dream boy 🇸🇪🇭🇰💙💛

      in reply to
      In brief: What people learned about PEMDAS in primary school and highschool is an oversimplification of how actual mathematicians and math users write math in scientific papers.