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 :)
What’s especially wild to me is that even the position of “it’s ambiguous” gets almost as much pushback as trying to argue that one of them is universally correct.
Last time this came up it was my position that it was ambiguous and needed clarification and had someone accuse me of taking a prescriptive stance and imposing rules contrary to how things were actually being done. How asking a person what they mean or seeking clarification could possibly be prescriptive is beyond me.
Bonus points, the guy telling me I was being prescriptive was arguing vehemently that implicit multiplication having precedence was correct and to do otherwise was wrong, full stop.
When I went to college, I was given a reverse Polish notation calculator. I think there is some (albeit small) advantage of becoming fluent in both PEMDAS and RPN to see the arbitrariness. This kind of arguement is like trying to argue linguistics in a single language.
Btw, I’m not claiming that RPN has any bearing on the meme at hand. Just that there are different standards.
This comment is left by the HP50g crew.
It would be better if we just taught math with prefix or postfix notation, as it removes the ambiguity.