Hilarious math errors posted on Social Media

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
101

I don’t think so, but I don’t see how it relates. I was complimenting the board and its members though.

Not sure what that reply is supposed to mean. Do you feel judged if you don’t know what day the Star Spangled Banner was written? If you were asked that question, would you feel offended over not knowing the answer?

I wouldn’t judge anyone for not knowing the order of operations, not having use them in years or decades. However, I do reserve judgement for those who continue to argue against them after the proper answer and how to get it is explained. But that’s not about their intelligence, education, or recall, it’s about their overall apathy towards knowing things and their encouragement of ignorance.

102

I’m convinced. I don’t know him, but I don’t like him either. I hope those were Australian Dollars. For Australian whisky.

103

Judging by the length of your posts on this subject, this is far more important to you than to me. I came here because of the hilarious in the title, please don’t take my remarks in earnest. No offense meant.

104

And my math ignorance shows. I meant 5 and 6 figure contracts, but for some reason brain farted on that.

105

You were counting the figures after the decimal point?

106

Fair, but I use math everyday for everything, and I just don’t see how people manage to get through life without understanding the basics. Well, I do see how people get through life without understanding the basics, poorly.

And then, I enjoy math recreationally as well. My favorite youtube channel is Numberphile followed closely by Standup Maths, and I get a thrill of excitement when I see a new video posted to those.

I do think that math is taught poorly, that it’s a bunch of arbitrary conventions made up by eggheads that you need to rote memorize to get through these tests, then never need to know it again. If people understood that things like @pulykamell 's example of breaking down the costs of a gift for his friend were real world word problems, then they would understand better the need for, and use of, things like the order of operations. He used them without even knowing he was using them, but there are those who wouldn’t have even known how to start figuring out how to solve the problem.

And math teaches more than just how to apply operations to numbers, it teaches how to think logically, how to problem solve, and is fundamental to critical thinking (though science, another oft hated subject, is also a cornerstone of critical thinking as well).

107

I honestly don’t know what I was thinking. I was thinking of a few contracts in the tens of thousands, and one that broke a hundred thousand, and my fingers typed the numbers that they typed. It was only when I looked over it well after the edit window that I realized the magnitudes of my error.

108

No, there really aren’t. Most people do know what things to group together. Once again – nothing to do with knowledge of so-called “Order of Operations.” No human being would ever think of four shirts at 2 dollars plus 3 shirts at 3 dollars as 4 * 2 + 3 * 3 and do that from left to right. Nobody. They might get the wrong answer, but they’re not going to come up with 33 because they’re going left-to-right and don’t know their order of operations. They’ll get it wrong because they eff up 4 * 2 or 3 * 3.

Partly what I’m saying is that what makes it confusing is the notation itself. Express it as a word problem, and almost everyone will conceptually understand it. If I tell my kid, who has no knowledge of order of operations, hey, I have 2 dimes and 2 nickels, how much money is that? She will get the correct answer. But if I write it as 2 x 10 + 2 x 5, I’m reasonably certain she will get it wrong. This doesn’t mean she’s bad at math – it just means she is unaware of the convention we settled on. She clearly understands how to do (2x10) + (2x5) even though she doesn’t know how to read or write it conventionally.

109

From F in Exams, The Very Best Totally Wrong Test Answers:

To change centimeters to meters you…

take out the centi

110

But when you wrote down your word problem you did automatically use order of operations to make sure that the things were grouped correctly.

If someone writes down that word problem without understanding them, then they very well could make the mistakes that you avoided by understanding them.

Anyway, can we do a hilarious entries on resumes thread? I’m reviewing some applications from Indeed, and have gems like, “I was a cashier, I stalked and cleaned tables.”

Lots and lots of basic grammar and punctuation errors, the kind that I wouldn’t feel any need to point out in casual conversation, or even here on the SDMB, but this is their resume, how they choose to present themselves to potential employers.

111

I use math every single day at work and have for over 30 years. If anyone had ever written out 2 x 10 + 2 x 5 to explain the math behind the value of two nickels and two dimes, they’d be taken to the woodshed. In the old days we’d have some C programmer or something who’d get all butthurt about having to put in superfluous parenthesis for his stupid colleagues, but then his stupid colleagues became his bosses, because being able to communicate was more important than being pedantically correct.

We do have problems with people being bad at basic math all the time. Executives who do not understand that a 10% decrease followed by a 10% increase does not get you back to the same level. People who do not understand that you can’t just add a 10% increase in price and a 5% increase in volume and get a 15% increase in costs. But none of this is solved by being more cryptic about how we represent numbers.

112

As a professional mathematician, I would never write such an expression without clarifying parentheses. BOMBDAS, my ass.

113

I’m sure you’d rattle on for hours.

114

I’m amazed you had the balls to say that.

115

This thread makes me think of Tom Lehrer. If you are as old as I am you know why.

116

I knew I could count on you for a well calculated response.

117

New division?

118

Exactly as was expressed to me, programming COBOL on an IBM 360, in 1969.

Dan

119

This is so true. I couldn’t count the number of people that had no concept of how to figure change. The worst were people that were trying to get rid of all their change. Their bill would be $10.02, so they would give you $10.87 and thought they were making it easy on you because you could just give them a dollar back. I wish I was making this up.

120

So the error that gets me, which seems surprisingly common, is when people do this:

“Wow, the ACA website cost $300 million dollars to set up! They could’ve just given every American a million dollars instead, and then they could pay for their own healthcare”

Or “Michael Bloomberg spent $500 million on advertising during the democratic primaries. Why not just pay every American $1.7 million dollars to vote for him?”

And as a math problem, that’s a really fundamental and stupid way to make an error, but whatever.

What gets me is… don’t you have another part of your brain, even if you get the math wrong, that does some kind of sanity checking? If I were to ask you to calculate how old you are in hours, and you got an answer of 400, or 400,000,000,000, you’d know “that can’t possibly be right, let me double check that”

But these idiots that post the above examples apparently not only can’t do really easy math, but have no sanity check in their brains either. After all, if every $300 million could instead be spent to give Americans a million dollars each, then cutting one tiny government program that costs $3B a year is $10 million for everyone! How crazy is it that we could cut the federal budget by a tiny fraction of a percent and all be 10-millionaires! Wow! Why don’t we do that? It’s so simple!

Or you could reverse it. If cutting the budget by 300 million dollars means we can give every American a million dollars, doesn’t that mean that every 300-million dollar program is being funded by a million dollars per American? That would mean that each American is contributing roughly 22 million dollars each in taxes to fund our military alone while, somehow, only making about $45,000 themselves on average. What a tax rate.

That’s the one that really drives me nuts because I’ve seen it pop up in like a dozen places and yet there are like 5 different ways you can see how obviously stupid such an error was.