Posted on 08/01/2019 4:58:47 AM PDT by Renkluaf
“8÷2(2+2).” Can you solve this math problem? The equation went viral online this week on Twitter causing major confusion over the right answer. Mathematicians and physicists went nuts about it. Mike Breen, the Public Awareness Officer for the American Mathematical Society, told popular Mechanics: “The way it’s written, it’s ambiguous. In math, a lot of times there are ambiguities. Mathematicians try to make rules as precise as possible.” Depending on where in the world you learned math, as Mashable reported, determines how you can solve the problem.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
The answer is 16. The real answer is the question is poorly written.
You are using math methods that resulted in men walking on the moon.
What an old fool you are.
It’s time for you to get woke.
Once that happens you will understand the correct answer is 16.
I’m with you....but NOT a mathematician - have to send to my son who has a degree in Math - and my other 2 sons who have engineering degrees.....
At Sunday night family dinner the 3 of them have deep discussions about higher math that seem like speaking a foreign language to me - and that’s what it is.......
Seems as though the problem is whether you were taught to use BODMAS or PEMDAS. As you can see, in BODMAS the division comes first and in PEMDAS the mult comes first. It depends upon which set of rules you were taught, and that seems to vary depending upon the location in the world you were taught math.
42 ;)
Based on programming rules it’d be 16 from operator precedence.
However, when writing equations in textbooks I notice there is minimization of divisor signs for clarity.
E.g. if I want to say that a times b, is divided by c times d I would write
ab / cd
not
a / c * b / d
Which is the same in terms of operator precedence.
Of course if you’re teaching fractions in grade school you’d use the second as an example.
I calculated it as 16. Plugged it into Wolfram Alpha. Answer: 16. Plugged it into Windows calculatot. Answer: 16. Plugged it into phone calculator. Answer: 16.
Answer: 16.
It is a matter of which convention you use, not math itself.
So being a “math genius” is neither here nor there.
A close analogy:
What date is 5/6/2019?
It depends on where you learned dates.
The answer is May 6, 2019.
The answer is also June 5, 2019.
The answer is “19” according to Louis Farrakhan.
You must have posted while I was copying the link from Wolfram alpha...
8 -------- = 1 2(2 + 2)
If it was written that way, yes. But that is not how it is written.
Unfortunately in your second step, you multiplied 2 and 4 in parentheses, instead of dividing 8 by 2. Multiplication and division have the same precedence and in this case, moving left to right, the division step comes first.
The correct answer is 16.
We have a winner.
Exactly. I learned the mnemonic My Dear Aunt Susie in fifth grade, so I’d have said the answer is 1.
By the way, Excel calls it an invalid formula because of a cell reference error, whatever that means.
16 or 1. You always do the parenthesis first = 4. Then comes the tricky part. Do you divide the 8 by 2 which gives you 4 and multiply the parenthesis 4 by that 4 which equals 16, or do you multiply the parenthesis 4 by 2 which would give you 8. If you then divide the first 8 by the second 8 you’d get 1. Ambiguous at best.
Math is such an exact science. On that we can all agree.
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