Order of operations is critical in programming equations in code.
I didn’t fully grasp PEMDAS until I became a programmer and used it regularly.
PEMDAS is just a standard that allows for consistent results.
The order could have been different if everyone agreed to use a different rule.
What’s vague about the expression written with the purpose of causing people to get the wrong answer? It deliberately avoids the use of clarifying marks. It mixes operations with the purpose of having the reader misinterpret the equation. It is devoid of any context as to why, for example, one of the factors is multiplied by zero.
It’s a trick question, looking to make someone feel stupid for not following arbitrary order of operation rules.
I think Rickjay’s “it” was “order of operations,” not “the expression written with the purpose of causing people to get the wrong answer.”
That said, there are plenty of these gotcha questions on Facebook that are written in a deliberately ambiguous fashion–especially where the contents of parentheses are multiplied by something outside of the parentheses in a way that gets you a weird answer if you use the distributive property. (I can’t find an example right now, but I’ve seen them). The ones I’ve seen are well-disguised data-mining operations, the sorts of questions that people love to answer and link their friends to, and the person posting the question can analyze social networks. Don’t engage!
It’s not vague at all, if you understand the order of operations. That’s kinda the whole point of them.
The pathetic state of math literacy in our nation is something to be ashamed of, not celebrated or defended.
I manage a team of programmers. I make it clear that our shop standards require easily maintainable code.
COMPUTE X= Y + Table(J) / 4.4.
Should include parentheses. Make it simple for the guy that has to read that code 7 years from now. He may have responded to a call at midnight to fix the code and restart the nights processing.
COMPUTE X= Y + (Table(J) / 4.4).
Some of our equations for statistical reports can be several lines long and reference several tables.
Or you could eliminate most of PEMDAS by using parenthesis more often and then you don’t get non-programmers who haven’t needed to use PEMDAS in 20 or 30 years getting the wrong answer to
50+10x0+7+2=A
Solve for A
Or hell, we could just get rid of math altogether, then people wouldn’t be upset about getting the wrong answer.
Really, the entire point of a question like that isn’t to make you feel stupid, it’s to make you learn or to remember something that you had learned long ago. But those who hate learning would rather feel stupid, and that’s not the fault of math or PEDMAS.
The other thing is that when someone does something out of the ordinary, it throws you off and all of the sudden you can’t deal with the change in process. Especially if it’s something very routine like making change.
As suggested above, it’s old people getting it wrong more than young people. Old people who haven’t had to use order of operations for decades, because it is basically mathematics trivia for normal people living normal lives.
Let’s have an example… the sine function. From the day I graduated college until the day I die, the only time I will use the sine function will be to help my son with his math homework. Sine isn’t all that complicated, people should know what it is and whatnot, but I’m never, ever going to use it. The fact that I forgot much of what I learned about sine in 1988 doesn’t mean our nation’s math literacy is in the toilet.
Something about homosexuality and bisexuality? 
Case in point. One year during college I worked as a prep cook at a pizza place, maybe my best job ever but that’s a different story. I would occasionally get called up to work the register when it was busy or someone was on a break.
I was an Econ major, I took plenty of accounting and statistics classes on top of that, and had started as an engineering student with all the calculus that implies. I was no dummy, math-wise. But I sure was terrible at the register, especially as we had an older one that did not calculate change. Every once in a while someone would hand me bills and some amount of coins expecting me to do some ‘obvious’ consolidation of change and sometimes I would just blow a circuit breaker in my brain. I never got good at it.
And yes, some large percentage of the time, someone presenting something other than the minimum number of bills to make the transaction was either just as stupid as me, or less charitably, trying to pull some kind of scam.
What’s old people? If you are 90 and have dementia, then sure. If you are in your 40’s or 50’s, then these are things that you should at least be familiar with. I mean, does factorial come before or after exponents? I would have to look that one up to be sure, but at least I know that it’s a thing. But I deal with adding and multiplying numbers on a daily basis, just running a household budget requires being able to do such simple things, and often, knowing the order of operations on those is extremely helpful. (But then most people are pretty terrible at budgeting, whether it be time or money.)
And even if you don’t remember which comes first, it’s extremely useful knowing at all that there is an order, rather than complaining that it’s “vague”. In the first case, it’s a quick look on wiki to recall them, in the second, it’s wallowing in self imposed ignorance.
I haven’t used the sine function myself since math class. However, knowing what a sine function is, recognizing one, and knowing what it means has served well. You ever hear of a pure sine wave inverter? If you don’t know what “sine wave” means, then you have no idea why it’s better, right? (That’s just one example off the top of my head, if you need, I can give a whole lot more times when understanding what a sine wave is can increase your understanding substantially as to what is going on.)
And as you just mentioned, you are helping your son with it. How do you do that if you don’t understand it yourself? Especially if you are as dismissive about the applications of math with him as you are here.
If you asked me to solve a partial differential equation, I’d struggle pretty heavily, not having done so since I was a teen. But, if you asked me to catch a ball you tossed me, I probably could do that, which means that I’m solving partial differential equations in my head.
The entire point of math isn’t to get you to memorize trig or log tables or even the order of operations, it is to get you to understand the basics of how the world around you works.
Is the contention that people are, in fact, making more “hilarious math errors” today than way back whenever? Or is it just that now you can find the occasional such photo on Social Media?
If you studied mathematics, then, agreed, the point is not to memorize anything specific, but I would expect you, if you had to, to be able to know enough to find the right resource and get back up to speed and actually solve the actual partial differential equation in question, not merely to be able to “understand” how it works.
PEDMAS isn’t just “some weird thing mathematicians do to seem smart”. It actually makes understanding equations more efficient for people who commonly handle equations, just based on the fact that equations that are a bunch of product/quotients followed by a bunch of additions/subtractions. Taking away a useful convention for frequent practitioners just to avoid occasional embarrassment of people who don’t use math much on facebook seems like a bad trade.
In fact, I’d think that anyone who refers to it as “PEDMAS” is probably not the target audience of the rule. I’ve not met a person who needed to use the rule with even moderate frequency, who hadn’t internalized it beyond the need for mnemonics.
Eh, people have been idiots in cars since cars were a thing, but there’s a whole subreddit dedicated to videos of them, since videoing and sharing people being idiots in cars is the part that’s new.
I’d say similar here. We’ve all seen, and probably done, some interesting math errors, but until recently, we were not able to share them with the world.
Uh, in how long a time? Sure, if I had to, I could probably do it in a few hours, hopefully.
I’m sure we’ve all imagined what we would do if we went back in time, and i’ve joked that I would destroy math for the future, by inventing calculus, but doing so via the power rule, rather than through L’Hôpital’s rule and limits, as I can remember the former, but not the latter. And being handed calculus, but not its underpinnings could screw up the foundations of math for centuries.
I don’t disagree with any of that. My point is that an awful lot of people do not commonly handle equations of that type* and don’t use the rule at all ** and the fact that older people more often get those Facebook questions wrong doesn’t mean that kids today are better at math. It mostly means that people forget what they don’t use.
*\ Technically, if I want to figure out how much 3 gallons of milk costs, I’m using an equation but the order of operations is completely irrelevant to that one.
** I’m not sure how the order of operations is helpful for household math, but I’m willing to believe it is for some people. But not for me.
I’m not dismissive of math, I’m dismissive of trick questions on Facebook being used to prove that people are bad at math.
OoO is a very useful convention to allow a person to correctly evaluate an equation written by someone else. That skill doesn’t come up a lot in life, and it is a convention, not a natural law.
What do you do if you want to tally up your entire grocery list?
How do you do your monthly budget and bills?
Do you understand mortgages and loans, and how much you pay on them?
Math isn’t just about the esoteric exercise of manipulating ephemeral numbers, it teaches you how to think about the world. Everyone I know that hates math also never has any money, even if they make more than I do.
I had an employee tell me that they were going to be late coming back from break because they wanted to go home since they thought they left a light on, and didn’t want to pay for the electricity. I went through the math with her, and demonstrated that she’d be spending about 10x the cost on gas alone, not to mention wear and tear, than she would spend on electricity even if the light was on all day.
This is something that, having a good feel for numbers, I wouldn’t have even considered to be a useful use of time and resources, but she didn’t even think about it in mathematical terms until I broke it down for her.
Right—just like everything in every language except English is basically trivia for normal people living normal lives, because I’m not going to use it, and anybody who uses a foreign language around me is just making me feel stupid.
I think that’s fair. And we’ve had whole threads in the past about such “trick questions.”
But the order of operations isn’t just for trick questions on Facebook. Without it, it would be way harder to communicate and work with mathematical expressions.