https://zeta.one/viral-math/

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 :)

  • Pulptastic@midwest.socialEnglish
    3116·
    7 months ago

    I disagree. Without explicit direction on OOO we have to follow the operators in order.

    The parentheses go first. 1+2=3

    Then we have 6 ÷2 ×3

    Without parentheses around (2×3) we can’t do that first. So OOO would be left to right. 9.

    In other words, as an engineer with half a PhD, I don’t buy strong juxtaposition. That sounds more like laziness than math.

      • Pulptastic@midwest.socialEnglish
        2·
        7 months ago

        I did read the article. I am commenting that I have never encountered strong juxtaposition and sharing why I think it is a poor choice.

        • flying_sheep@lemmy.ml
          1·
          7 months ago

          You probably missed the part where the article talks about university level math, and that strong juxtaposition is common there.

          I also think that many conventions are bad, but once they exist, their badness doesn’t make them stop being used and relied on by a lot of people.

          I don’t have any skin in the game as I never ran into ambiguity. My university professors simply always used fractions, therefore completely getting rid of any possible ambiguity.

    • The Menemen!@lemmy.world
      8·
      7 months ago

      as an engineer with half a PhD

      As an engineer with a full PhD. I’d say we engineers aren’t that great with math problems like this. Thus any responsible engineer would write it in a way that cannot be misinterpreted. Because misinterpreted mathematics can kill people…

          • Agrivar@lemmy.world
            11·
            7 months ago

            I read the article, and it explained the situation and the resultant confusion very well. That said, could we not have some international body just make a decision one way or the other, instead of perpetuating this uncertainty?

            • wischi@programming.devOP
              4·
              7 months ago

              It’s practically impossible to do that because (applied) mathematics is such a diverse field and there is no global authority (and really can’t be).

              Math notation is very similar to natural languages what you are proposing is a bit like saying we have an ambiguity in english with the word “bat”. It can mean the animal or the sport device. To prevent confusion the oxford dictionary editors just decide that from now on “bat” only refers to the animal and not the club. Problem solved globally? Probably not :-)

              What you can do/try is to enforce some rules in smaller groups, like various style guides and standards are trying to do. For example it’s way simpler for a university to enforce certain conventions and styles for the work they and their students produce. But all engineers in Belgium couldn’t care less what a university in India is thinking about math notations.

              For real projects that involve many people there are typically industry standards that are followed that work a bit like in the university example and is enforced by the participants of the project.